No make Water tax exempt and we can all start getting cheap water
water IS tax exempt.
I sometimes work with food reporting data for what my institution calls "low resource populations" (poor people). My impression from reading their food reports is that they have no idea about calories or anything like that, but drinking soda makes them feel relatively satisfied and also all the advertisements tell them soda is great. I have read multiple reports where the only things the person consumes all day are a) soda and one of some kind of sandwich, or b) soda/coffee/fast food. The first type of person has almost no money to buy food and they choose to buy soda. The second type of person probably has a job and is looking for fullness (hence the fast food), and the ability to keep going through a long work day and commute (so they go for high caffeine). I have read these reports for people with families, pregnant women, etc.
The food reports also ask questions about supplements, snake oil products, "enzymes", and that kind of thing. Poor people love buying these things because we have zero protection against ads that tell them these products will help them get through their day.
Advertising is FAR more influential over people's food choices than someone going on the internet and learning about calories or the nutritional value/economic cost-benefit analysis of soda. Poor people are not going on the internet for this.
not sure why you responded to me, because you were responding to arguments I didn't make.
That one (insane) poster was throwing up a bizarre hypothetical example where a person who is poor and starving to death but suffering from a medical condition where he could not eat food AND was inexplicably averse to water would have no choice but to drink coca cola to stay alive as there were no other food options at that price point.
This hypothetical is so insane it's not even worth the time to address it. No one is ever at this point, because cheaper options exist than soda which ACTUALLY have nutritional value- and advertising preventing awareness wouldnt stop them from taking advantage of this. Milk alone fits the bill. So do generic cans of soup. Chugging mountain dew to live is a bizarre proposition that will never, ever happen.
That being said, addressing the rest of your post, I don't disagree re: the effectiveness of advertising. in the 60s and 70s poor people were still a thing, but the drink of choice for most people was either milk or water. Soda didn't blow up until television advertising did in the 80s.
You can't ban soda advertising (well..not in any practical sense) but tax policy has been shown to be an EXTREMELY effective hammer at undoing the effect of shitty advertising on the poor. Look at the rates of smoking between the 70s and 80s and present day- smoking has been reduced to an activity enjoyed by only a small minority of the population- not because big tobacco can't advertise anymore (they still do- though not on TV) but because cigarettes have been hit with massive taxes pretty much everywhere.
The same will probably be true for soda when the Philadelphia experiment succeeds, which is why the industry is fighting so hard against it.
