It’s not a ‘glow-up’, it’s a patch: The controversial tax increase that doesn’t convince anyone
Imagine the scene: the government announces, with all the pomp of a superhero movie trailer, an increase in taxes on tobacco and soft drinks. Sounds good, right? Like that New Year’s resolution that we all make but abandon in the second week of January. Well, it turns out that public health experts and civil associations have seen the proposal and their reaction has been unanimous: a collective facepalm. Basically, they said yesterday that the Executive’s measure is the nutritional equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a wound that needs stitches. Insufficient, far from ideal and, ultimately, a gesture that falls short of truly combating the prevalence of diseases such as cardiovascular problems, lung conditions, cancer and the well-known obesity.
I mean, yes, they applaud that something is finally being done. It’s like when your roommate finally washes his dirty dish that had been sitting in the sink for a week: it’s appreciated, but it’s not like it has solved the underlying problem of his questionable hygiene. The specialists approved the increase of the IEPS as a step in the right direction, a measure that could help discourage consumption and, in the process, fill the public coffers a little more. But immediately afterwards, and here comes the twist, they pointed out that the proposal falls far short of what the top global health guru recommends: the World Health Organization (WHO). A classic case of “you tried, but you could have tried harder.”
Reviews with a taste of déjà vu: Is just raising prices the solution?
But the thing doesn’t stop there. The representatives of civil society arrived with their hands on their hips and unleashed a criticism that is painfully familiar to us: the strategy seems to boil down to increasing prices and that’s it. And education? And the underlying public policies? Zero mention of a robust physical education policy in schools, for example. It is as if to solve the traffic problem, the only solution was to make cars more expensive, instead of improving public transportation. A myopic vision that ignores the root causes of the problem. Does this tactic sound familiar to anyone?
In the Forum on Healthy Taxes (a very serious name for a discussion that became intense), organized by Morena in the Chamber of Deputies, the director of the organization Salud Justa, Erik Ochoa, was in charge of releasing the raw data. He approved the idea of raising the tax so that each cigarette costs 1.15 pesos, but then he dropped the bomb: it is insufficient. The WHO suggests that the tax should be 75% of the final price. Ochoa’s proposal is more ambitious: increase taxes to three pesos per cigarette. According to their calculations, this would reduce consumption by 41.3%, increase revenue by 26.3% and, most importantly, in a decade it would prevent 73,746 premature deaths and almost 18,000 cases of cancer. Come on, with the current proposal we are settling for crumbs when we could have the whole cake.
On the beverage side, Paulina Magaña, from El Poder del Consumidor and the Alianza por la Salud Alimentaria, put on the table the WHO recommendation for sweetened beverages: a 20% increase on the final cost, which translates into about 7 extra pesos per liter. She estimates that this would raise 210% more than what the current Economic Package proposes. I mean, we’re leaving an obscene amount of money on the table that could go toward, I don’t know, improving the healthcare system? It sounds like someone didn’t do their homework right.
And to give it a touch of economic reality, Cuauhtémoc Rivera, president of the National Alliance of Small Merchants, complained that the increase in the cost of products is always justified with the promise of reducing chronic diseases, but after a decade of these policies, it is still not clear what that aid translates into. It is the eternal promise of “trust the process” that never materializes into tangible results for ordinary citizens.
In short, what we have is a measure that, at best, is a good attempt, and at worst, an empty gesture that does not address the problem with the necessary forcefulness. Raising taxes is fine, but if it is not accompanied by education, prevention and transparency in the use of resources, it remains just another anecdote in the eternal battle between public health and economic interests. A battle that, by the way, we are far from winning with these lukewarm strategies.
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