Showing posts with label Berkeley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Berkeley. Show all posts

Friday, May 22, 2015

California: Berkeley soda tax: First month's take, $116,000

BERKELEY -- Several City Council members and other boosters of Berkeley's first-in-the-nation soda tax giddily reported the first month's haul -- $116,000 -- on the steps of the municipal office building on Milvia Street on Monday.
Councilman Laurie Capitelli, a prominent booster of the freshly enacted tax, projected the first year's proceeds at about $1.2 million.

On Nov. 4, voters approved Measure D, a 1-cent-per-ounce tax on the distribution of most sugar-sweetened beverages, by a better than 3-1 margin, even though, as a general tax with proceeds to go into the general fund, it needed only a simple majority.

The city did not estimate what the tax might bring in, but unofficial estimates from proponents had pegged the annual take at anywhere from $1 million to $2 million.

A shelf of diet and regular soft drinks sit in a refrigerator at a market in San Francisco.
A shelf of diet and regular soft drinks sit in a refrigerator at a market in San Francisco. (Jeff Chiu/Associated Press)
"What we really want to do, in 10 years, is collect no (soda) tax," Capitelli said during Monday's news conference, at which council members Linda Maio and Max Anderson spoke. Councilman Kriss Worthington also attended. The hope, Capitelli said, was that people would stop consuming unhealthy beverages altogether.

Standing on the periphery of the news conference was Roger Salazar, spokesman for the No on D campaign, which had argued that the tax would be a government cash grab that could be spent on anything politicians desire, without any guarantee it would go to any health-related programs, despite promises by proponents that its proceeds would go to nutrition and education programs.

Via: Contra Costa Times

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Tuesday, October 15, 2013

A Return to Keynes?

The nomination of Janet Yellen to become head of the Federal Reserve System has set off a flurry of media stories. Since she will be the first woman to occupy that position, we can only hope that this will not mean that any criticism of what she does will be attributed to sex bias or to a "war on women."
The Federal Reserve has become such a major player in the American economy that it needs far more scrutiny and criticism than it has received, regardless of who heads it.
Ms. Yellen, a former professor of economics at Berkeley, has openly proclaimed her views on economic policy, and those views deserve very careful scrutiny. She asks: "Will capitalist economies operate at full employment in the absence of routine intervention?" And she answers: "Certainly not."
Janet Yellen represents the Keynesian economics that once dominated economic theory and policy like a national religion -- until it encountered two things: Milton Friedman and the stagflation of the 1970s.
At the height of the Keynesian influence, it was widely believed that government policy-makers could choose a judicious trade-off between the inflation rate and the rate of unemployment. This trade-off was called the Phillips Curve, in honor of an economist at the London School of Economics.
Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago attacked the Phillips Curve, both theoretically and empirically. When Professor Friedman received the Nobel Prize in economics -- the first of many to go to Chicago economists, who were the primary critics of Keynesian economics -- it seemed as if the idea of a trade-off between the inflation rate and the unemployment rate might be laid to rest.

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