Since the article mentions it, the amount of carbonation in any given beverage actually varies by a lot. The traditional measurement of carbonation is in "volumes", which is the amount of space the CO2 would take up at standard temperature and pressure (32F and 1 atm). Coca Cola is usually packaged at 3 volumes; if you took all the CO2 out of the soda it would occupy 3x the volume of the soda it came from.
Alcoholic beverages on the other hand have a pretty wide range of regular carbonation levels. On your lower end you have stouts and Scottish ales at 1.9-2.1, and on the high end you get your dubbel and heffe weisen at 3-3.5 volumes. Champagne is regularly in the 4.5-6 range, which necessitates a different bottle and closure design to handle the 2-3x pressure it contains compared to beer.
On a particularly dumb note, ciders are limited by law to 0.64g per 100ml, or 3.2 volumes. Above that level they cease being ciders and instead become a sparkling wine. This is very important because natural cider is taxed at $0.226 per gallon, while sparkling wine is taxed at $3.30 or $3.40 per gallon depending on how the carbonation is added. This is a difference of roughly 30 cents per standard bottle, or $1.79 per six pack; enough of a difference to make similar products more attractive on the market place shelf.
> On a particularly dumb note, ciders are limited by law to 0.64g per 100ml, or 3.2 volumes. Above that level they cease being ciders and instead become a sparkling wine. This is very important because natural cider is taxed at $0.226 per gallon, while sparkling wine is taxed at $3.30 or $3.40 per gallon depending on how the carbonation is added. This is a difference of roughly 30 cents per standard bottle, or $1.79 per six pack; enough of a difference to make similar products more attractive on the market place shelf.
I've seen this with chocolate too. The definition of chocolate in the UK and EU apparently requires one of the ingredients to be sugar, making sugar-free chocolate unable to be called chocolate unless it actually contains sugar. A friend of mine runs a keto chocolate company and he has to include a small amount of coconut sap to actually be allowed to market it as chocolate, even though he's trying to minimise carbohydrate content.
On the one hand, this seems a rather silly law, but on the other hand, how else do you define what a particular product is? Is it down to how it's marketed? Because then companies will just market it as something else that still hints it's the thing it's not, to avoid the tax and potentially gain more price-conscious customers.
That kind of exemplifies a very British problem that we have with very vague and increasingly slow bureaucracy. There’s often no clear cut answer to a question. I think it’s one of the reasons why we get the least amount of productive work done per hour in Western Europe. In our national mythology we think of ourselves as a low bureaucracy country compared to say France, but in actual fact in those countries you will quickly be told no if something is not permitted whereas here there’s a lot of equivocating until, after 6 months of uncertainty you reach a seemingly random semi compromise result.
Do you mean unsweetened instead of sugar-free (though that would sound... odd)? Because I know several brands of sugar-free chocolate in Finland that are sold as just that, sugar-free chocolate. They usually contain maltitol, aspartame, or some other sweetener.
Possibly there needs to be something classified as a sweetener, yes, but the definition of "sugar-free" is apparently also anything with 0.1g or less sugar per 100g, so may it be that there is still a bit of sugar in the sugar-free brands you mentioned?
I checked one and it contains 0.1g of sugar per 100g, but it's not added sugar, it's contained in the other ingredients. I don't know if it's possible to make it with absolutely 0g of sugar. But there is no separate ingredient "sugar" there.
You know what's even dumber? Having a product that can vary in price 1000x or more...and taxing it by volume, instead of by its price.
Yet another way the rich shift more tax burden away from themselves. They pay a pittance of a tax on a $5,000 bottle of wine, while everyone buying "two buck chuck" at Trader Joes ($3-4/bottle) is getting hit with a huge tax percentage-wise.
Even taxing alcohol at different rates just because it's made with specific fruits is idiotic. It smacks of lobbyists buying off their congressional reps to get a rival sub-industry slapped with a higher tax. Just tax alcohol by its value, across the board at the same rate.
If alcohol is taxed based on public health and safety concerns, it makes sense that the tax is proportional to the amount on neat alcohol contained in a product rather than the price of the product. Or maybe even a "progressive" tax, if we consider things like distilled spirits to cause more rowdy behavior and other kinds of disturbances.
Yes, but there is an argument to be made that if the best 'bang per buck' would be distilled spirits, the problem with rowdy drinkers would be even worse, as a bottle of cheap vodka/whisky/whatever is more portable, and particularly for younger more inexperienced people it's much easier to drink it too fast and end up in the ER getting your stomach pumped.
Indirectly, the difference between ciders and sparkling wine is CO2 content but it’s a binary difference where in rising CO2 within each range has zero tax implications.
Even dumber is the practice of banning things. For example, California is banning gas powered leaf blowers and chain saws. This is going to cause a problem for people who need to clear downed trees during a power outage after a storm.
The usual solution is to carve out a bunch of exceptions. These exceptions tend to be incomplete and don't evolved with the times.
A far better solution is to just tax the ICEs that drive these things. Make it so that for most mundane uses, the electric ones will be cheaper. But the people who really need them can get them without mounting a lobbying campaign at the politicians.
> A far better solution is to just tax the ICEs that drive these things.
Even simpler and more effective is raising fossil fuel taxes. If the goal is to reduce usage of fossil fuels.
If the goal is to look like you are doing something about fossil fuel consumption, but do not really want to give up your SUV/pickup trucks, extraneous driving, life in large houses in spread out cities, and frivolous flights, then selectively targeting certain products is the way to go.
The issue with these small machines like lawn mowers and chainsaw is not really they CO2 the pump out, which is minuscule compared to all the other sources of CO2, but rather that they have zero pollution controls and put out a lot of particulates, unburned hydrocarbons and whatnot. It's a question of local pollution, not global climate.
And further, since your average homeowner doesn't use his chainsaw or lawn mower that much, they are relatively insensitive to the price of gas. Or IOW, if you were to raise the price of gas enough to reduce usage of these machines that way, it'd grind the whole economy to a halt.
> Even simpler and more effective is raising fossil fuel taxes.
In general I agree with you, and that ought to be done for cars. But those small engines tend to be very dirty polluters, and it would be impractical to put an extra tax on gasoline meant for those engines.
A reasonable tax would be $50 to $100. The state is good at taxing in this manner, and the revenue could be used to subsidize some green project (though we both know the tax revenue will just be wasted, sigh).
My electric lawn mower is so much more reliable and quieter than my old 2 stroke gas mower. I don't live in California, but either way, I'd refuse to go back to using a 2 stroke.
Yeah, they are great but usually for commercial use — usually big, expensive and heavy. If you have a big yard, there’s a gap between a battery powered blower or weed whacker and gas.
Personally, i think battery powered lawn gear is winning the consumer market as it is, banning stuff is just forcing people to accept inferior solutions for their needs.
The engines in those wear out after a time. A home owner can use the same saw for years, but a pro using it for a full workday will replace it every few years.
Perhaps for leaf blowers that it's all upside - but for good size chainsaws say something that can drive a 24" bar, electric just isn't available.
I love my electric 18"er, but most all of the ponderosas I have to fell on my property require my 24" gas Husquavarna. And if you look for electric alternatives you find nothing for actually for sale.
I agree in general, and my own chainsaw is battery powered. However this is about a major storm/outage. My batteries (if I can find them all and they are charged) give me about an hour of cutting before they are dead. That is not enough to clear out a storm. I know pros sometimes have battery backbacks that will run all day, but they still need a way to get that battery charged overnight so they can run again the next day. I know people who have been without power for several weeks after a major storm, so one day isn't enough for crews to clean up.
Is the extra backpack harder to store than the extra gallon tank of gas in the trailer? It's not like they can refill the gas tanks without pumps working at the gas station. If they do have access to gasoline, with modern trucks they should be able to charge from the IC engine.
You've never bought batteries? Or, did you think that light weight and small yet powerful batteries were somehow inexpensive?
Whenever there's a discussion of using batteries for anything, the three issues that come up are cost, weight, and size. You can take a hit on one or two to get some improvement on the remainder, but...
Batteries for portable equipment must be good on weight and size given the power required, so cost is what goes up.
> You know what's even dumber? Having a product that can vary in price 1000x or more...and taxing it by volume, instead of by its price.
To be fair, this is just an excise tax on production. In most jurisdictions you'll also pay a percentage based sales tax on that as well. If you buy a bottle costing 2x as much, you'll pay 2x as much sales tax. Everywhere I've lived has had a pretty high sales tax on alcohol, in my current state I pay sales tax plus a volume based supplementary tax, the latter can get pretty high at $11.28 per gallon of distilled liquor.
Sales tax on discretionary and luxury products like this tend to be one of the few taxes that's actually somewhat progressive, given that the rich tend to consume a lot more in terms of dollar amount. Although in the case of alcohol, this would also hit addicts pretty hard.
> Even taxing alcohol at different rates just because it's made with specific fruits is idiotic. It smacks of lobbyists buying off their congressional reps to get a rival sub-industry slapped with a higher tax. Just tax alcohol by its value, across the board at the same rate.
Honestly, I think this is more about class than anything else. There is a long, sordid history of societies deciding that one type of alcohol is acceptable and classy, while another is base and to be suppressed. Usually the actual amount consumed doesn't seem to be a factor; nobody ever seems to get too mad at middle class and rich people for day drinking mimosas for example. My favorite cultural representation of this is "Beer Street and Gin Lane", which is both entertaining to me in its absurd hyperbole, and because I'm rather partial to gin.
Personally, I'm mixed on what I think an ideal alcohol tax would be. It seems to me that we now have the ability to track the actual volume of pure ethanol created and sold, something that recently post-prohibition regulators probably were not capable of doing[0]. On the flip side I do think that there is some social utility in driving up the cost of high proof distilled alcohol via tax; the time before prohibition really shows that cheap distilled spirits tends to make a bit of a mess of things. This could probably be accomplished by a progressive taxation system per gram of ethanol based on the ABV above a certain point.
Thankfully most cider is pretty damned good at 2.5 to 3 volumes of CO2.
0 - The inputs into the fermentation process are a pretty good way to estimate what percentage of alcohol you'll get back out on average, which can be used as a rough means to regulate based on ABV if you lack the technical or governmental capability to test, track, and tax such things. Not all alcohol tax rules seem to use it this way though, such as the difference between cider and sparkling wine based on CO2 volumes, even if it's created by artificially carbonating it.
> Personally, I'm mixed on what I think an ideal alcohol tax would be. It seems to me that we now have the ability to track the actual volume of pure ethanol created and sold, something that recently post-prohibition regulators probably were not capable of doing[0]. On the flip side I do think that there is some social utility in driving up the cost of high proof distilled alcohol via tax; the time before prohibition really shows that cheap distilled spirits tends to make a bit of a mess of things. This could probably be accomplished by a progressive taxation system per gram of ethanol based on the ABV above a certain point.
Broadly I agree, though I think in practice it would make life easier if this would be specified in "bands" rather than directly proportional to the alcohol content. The giant industrial scale producers can certainly produce mega-batch after mega-batch of identical product, but for small scale "craft" producers with more variability it sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare to have a different tax level for each batch.
> The giant industrial scale producers can certainly produce mega-batch after mega-batch of identical product, but for small scale "craft" producers with more variability it sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare to have a different tax level for each batch.
That variability is already allowed (in the UK at least, but not banding) and comrs with an unexpected side effect - large brewers were advertising at higher abv values then they were brewing at, but paying duty kn the lower value [0]. taxing by abv simplifies the cslculatuons; you just measure it once.
> That variability is already allowed (in the UK at least, but not banding) and comrs with an unexpected side effect - large brewers were advertising at higher abv values then they were brewing at, but paying duty kn the lower value [0].
You didn't expect them to forego an opportunity to shaft BOTH the consumer and the taxman at the same time, did you?
Why is standard temperature the freezing point? Why not 70F or 20C or something more within the range of normal experience? We didn't set 1 atmosphere as the atmospheric pressure experienced at the average altitude in the Himalayas.
Whoa, the numerical carbonation levels actually correspond pretty well to my memory of how “fizzy” those drinks taste on the tongue. This is the coolest trivia I’ve learned in awhile.
Though some what off topic: Even though style may dictate a different carbonation level. Draft beer is typically carbonated to around 2.4 volumes so it pours on most draft systems at bars. If you carbonate beer to far above this amount of volumes, the beer won't pour well. That is one reason why certain styles may taste different in a bottle versus on draft.
Alcoholic beverages on the other hand have a pretty wide range of regular carbonation levels. On your lower end you have stouts and Scottish ales at 1.9-2.1, and on the high end you get your dubbel and heffe weisen at 3-3.5 volumes. Champagne is regularly in the 4.5-6 range, which necessitates a different bottle and closure design to handle the 2-3x pressure it contains compared to beer.
On a particularly dumb note, ciders are limited by law to 0.64g per 100ml, or 3.2 volumes. Above that level they cease being ciders and instead become a sparkling wine. This is very important because natural cider is taxed at $0.226 per gallon, while sparkling wine is taxed at $3.30 or $3.40 per gallon depending on how the carbonation is added. This is a difference of roughly 30 cents per standard bottle, or $1.79 per six pack; enough of a difference to make similar products more attractive on the market place shelf.
https://www.ttb.gov/tax-audit/quick-reference-guide-to-wine-...