Soda Tax Could Shake Up Industry

[Bruce]

 Drinking a cold glass of Pepsi or coke is NOT a friggin sin. Get over yourselves. Anything can be taken to the extreme. For those of you who are complaining that obesity or diabetes is running up your health care cost, then please do me a favor: Stop driving your damn Carbon Monoxide belching cars around my state. Your ruining my atmosphere, maybe you should be sin taxed for that? Also cut back on your electricity usage as well as the coal required to assist in your living pleasure is screwing up my atmosphere as well. Turn your heat down or the air conditioner off to. In other words shut the hell up and stop throwing stones while you live in a glass house! Everyone does things that are not good for their bodies and to some extent affect others. That's because we all live here and have no place else to go..............................Bruce

[Simple Man]

Drinking a cold glass of Pepsi or coke is NOT a friggin sin. Get over yourselves. Anything can be taken to the extreme. For those of you who are complaining that obesity or diabetes is running up your health care cost, then please do me a favor: Stop driving your damn Carbon Monoxide belching cars around my state. Your ruining my atmosphere, maybe you should be sin taxed for that? Also cut back on your electricity usage as well as the coal required to assist in your living pleasure is screwing up my atmosphere as well. Turn your heat down or the air conditioner off to. In other words shut the hell up and stop throwing stones while you live in a glass house! Everyone does things that are not good for their bodies and to some extent affect others. That's because we all live here and have no place else to go..............................Bruce

Agreed.  But, the thing is you just described paradise for the Progressive Movement.  They seek to punish those who make choices they don't like and to influence behavior via putative taxation, just as they've always done with alcohol, tobacco, etc.  I wouldn't be surprised if, in the future, your Body Mass Index is tied to your tax bracket, so fatties have to pay a percentage of their income as a Good Health Tax.

But, in your analogy using driving and electricity usage, Gore, Obama, Hillary and the rest are rich enough to just buy carbon credits and continue living BAU.  It will be the rest of us (including the morons who voted for them) who will, as I said on another thread recently, end up with "our thermostats set at 60 degrees all winter, huddled under blankets in dark houses, watching Leonardo DiCaprio films on a solar-powered 5-inch LED screen."

Only us plebes will live that way, however.  Mark my words.

[Oceana]

Sorry, who said we don't have socialized healthcare yet?  What about medicare and medicaid?

[mxr618]

When I come to power:
Simple Man = Press Secretary

Stay out of my bedroom. Stay out of my pockets. Stay off my lawn.

When does it stop? When does putative taxation invade every facet of our lives? I love a nice glass of diet pop. I occasionally have diet beer. A nice tasty bag of Doritos with my sandwich is fantastic. Why not tax those all to hell? How about pizza? How about taxing people for the amount of time their television is on at home, keeping them from exercising? How about taxing sales from certain restaurants that fall below a certain government-mandated standard, like Applebees or Outback? How about taxing people on a sliding scale that don't adhere to the USDA food pyramid? How about taxing second helpings? Thirds? How about taxing dessert if it isn't a no-carb, no-sugar, no-fat, bowl of dirt?

[MOTM]

Ahhhh... I see it now. Trucks come down the streets, whistles blow, everyone stands out at the curbside to do 30 minutes of city-wide, mandated, exercises. Collection plate passed along, as we'll be taxed for the service.

forgot my purple

[Simple Man]

When I come to power:
Simple Man = Press Secretary

Stay out of my bedroom. Stay out of my pockets. Stay off my lawn.

 

[golddust]

Progressive movement, really? You may be talking of the far left, but I really think you should re-evaluate your terms.

And if you want to get into who sticks their noses into others people's business, the far right is always making choices for other people. To them there is ONE WAY to do things, and that happens to always coincide with their opinions. No other reality is valid but their own. And they often tax, they just call them "fees" so as to differentiate from the other side taxing everything. Apparently to those on that side of the fence, if it's a fee your money isn't getting taken, it's only taken if it's taxed. 

It helps to think of the political spectrum as a circle, not a linear line. The left can only go so far left before they bump right into the right. The right can only go so far right before they bump into the left. That place where the two meet after they've gone as far as they can go is usually wing nut land. No matter what the ideology.

[Simple Man]

Progressive movement, really? You may be talking of the far left, but I really think you should re-evaluate your terms.

And if you want to get into who sticks their noses into others people's business, the far right is always making choices for other people. To them there is ONE WAY to do things, and that happens to always coincide with their opinions. No other reality is valid but their own. And they often tax, they just call them "fees" so as to differentiate from the other side taxing everything. Apparently to those on that side of the fence, if it's a fee your money isn't getting taken, it's only taken if it's taxed. 

It helps to think of the political spectrum as a circle, not a linear line. The left can only go so far left before they bump right into the right. The right can only go so far right before they bump into the left. That place where the two meet after they've gone as far as they can go is usually wing nut land. No matter what the ideology.

Agreed.  I was in no way meaning to favor right over left.  In fact, I consider the division itself as an illusion concocted for entertainment and distraction purposes.  Both are corporate-controlled and elitist, two heads of the same beast.

People like Hillary Clinton are Progressives, big government-types, if you follow the movement back to its origins.  So was FDR and Woodrow Wilson.  They are often called liberals, but that is bullshit.  The true liberals are people like me who believe you should be free to do anything you want as long as it doesn't impede on the rights of anyone else.

[golddust]

Progressive movement, really? You may be talking of the far left, but I really think you should re-evaluate your terms.

And if you want to get into who sticks their noses into others people's business, the far right is always making choices for other people. To them there is ONE WAY to do things, and that happens to always coincide with their opinions. No other reality is valid but their own. And they often tax, they just call them "fees" so as to differentiate from the other side taxing everything. Apparently to those on that side of the fence, if it's a fee your money isn't getting taken, it's only taken if it's taxed. 

It helps to think of the political spectrum as a circle, not a linear line. The left can only go so far left before they bump right into the right. The right can only go so far right before they bump into the left. That place where the two meet after they've gone as far as they can go is usually wing nut land. No matter what the ideology.

The true liberals are people like me who believe you should be free to do anything you want as long as it doesn't impede on the rights of anyone else.

I'm in total agreement there.

[fredd58]

Why are we arguing the merits of soda pop??? This is ridiculous. It's a TAX - plain and simple. It fits right in with all of the other myriad, ubiquitous, in-your-face TAXES on damned near everything we touch. It's nothing more than another raid of your pocket to line THEIR pockets so they can continue the same policies of rape the public to maintain and continue to EXPAND the corporatocracy. They simply looked around to figure where they could make the most money - and how much soda pop is sold in this country?! There are ALOT of people out there who drink NOTHING ELSE all day every day. Next up? Coffee. Next up? Fast food outlets. As their legitimate tax base shrinks, these taxes will continue to go up and up and up. If people quit buying the above, they'll go on to whatever replaces them. This is not about sin or luxury taxes - it's about taking the most money they can OUT OF your pocket and INTO theirs. Period. They are leeches. They lost any legitimacy they ever had about 30 years ago, folks.