voted

[jinian]

Girl drags lazy ass out of house to do civic duty
"The badgers gave me strength," said K.P. (age 26).

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Hee - that's why I do vote-by-mail. This morning, I blearily filled out the ballot (going straight down the line with the Democratic flyer reccommendations, yes on both prop.s), put a stamp on it, and stuck it in the mailbox - and I was All Done. I could have been All Done last week, if I hadn't procrastinated on it so hard. ;)

[elynne.livejournal.com]

(p.s. yes, I'm gloating a little)

[pbrane.livejournal.com]

yes for the espresso tax?!?!? sheesh... I'm all for taxes, and education, but punishing small businesses ain't the way to do it. Now if we could get a way to just make Starbucks be the only one to pay, like a "Frappucino tax", then I'd be all for it. :\

[jinian.livejournal.com]

That was my thought, too. I was waffling a bit when everyone who talked about was phrasing things as if it were a sales tax, but when I found it it's a tax paid by the business, there was no way I was voting for that. The big places wouldn't change their prices, the little ones would have to, and that's not cool. (I thought it was flawed before that, since preschool and caffeination are (I hope) not closely related topics, but was tempted to vote for it out of coffee-hating schadenfreude.)

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Um... I am unclear how a ten cent tax on espresso beverages threatens small businesses, any more than the several dollars of taxes on cigarettes or gasoline hurts the independent stations and smoke shops that sell them. I suppose there might be an argument that the tax would induce customers to buy less espressos... but honestly, ten cents is not that big a deal for a double shot. If somebody can't cough up the extra ten cents, maybe they should have tea or something anyway.

Am I missing something, here?

[pbrane.livejournal.com]

The extra ten cents does slightly induce customers who sometimes get an espresso drink and sometimes just get the cheaper drip coffee to get the drip. That costs the coffeeshops business, unless they don't raise their prices, in which case it just costs them money. As jinian mentioned, the bigger stores just do the latter, and take a slight hit. But then the smaller shops are charging more, and people shift their coffeeshop preference from smaller stores to Starbucks, which can afford the short term hit to get more business...

Some other big differences with cigarrette and gas taxes is that the primary profits from cigarrettes and gas go to tobacco and oil compaines, but the primary profits in the coffee industry are at the level of the coffeeshop itself (technically, I can't provide data to back this up, but I'm pretty sure it's true that the margins on buying beans and roasting/selling espresso is a lot better than buying gasoline/cigarrettes and reselling it), and so when you tax the espresso, since taxes hit the place where the profit comes from, your taking money away from the cafe itself, as opposed to R.J. Reynolds or Sunoco.

Additionally, caffeine consumption is fairly flat on the scale of regressive (hits poor people more) vs. progressive (hits rich people more) taxation (a rich businessperson doesn't buy that much more espresso than a working joe), and I don't think you're in favor of that - all us progressives are much more a fan of progressive taxes. In comparison, gasoline taxes are pretty progressive: big big multinational industrial companies spend the most money on oil; and cigarrette taxes are horribly *regressive* - poor people smoke, and raising the taxes on tobacco doesn't make them smoke less, so while I'm a pretty socialist minded person, and hate smoking, cigarrette taxes aren't such a good idea either, in my book.

Phew... it's not really a big deal, but I guess I do have a pretty big opinion on this kind of thing, probably because I'm normally a big big fan of raising taxes in general, to pay for all sorts of good programs - I just think we should make sure our taxes come from the right places (income tax, for one thing, wouldn't that be a good idea!).

[torquemada.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind also that many (if not most) independent coffeeshops do not differentiate in their accounting between drip coffee versus espresso. While a Starbucks can just roll out a patch to their register software, and then add a new report to automatically calculate the tax, the indies will have to adopt new accounting practices and start doing a lot more paperwork -- adding a time cost to the additional cost of doing business.

If it had been an SUV tax for children, I'd have voted YES ten times.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Yeah, yeah. :) The polling place is only kittycorner across the street, I am just EXTRA LAZY. I do absentee when I'm actually going to be away, but my vote feels more useful somehow if I make sure it gets counted on the day.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

I usually send in my mail-in vote way ahead of time. This time, if it's really really close, I'll have the excitement of knowing that I was one of the tie-breakers! Or something. ;)

[supergee.livejournal.com]

They would chase me out of the house if I didn't know how to turn them off.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I think you should know that I wound up with a permanent badger earworm even though my sound wasn't turned on when I followed the link.