| | OPINION
The Rise and Fall of the Disposables and Sweet-Drink Taxes
by Yitzchok Roth
The first decision which the new Treasury Minister made dealt with the Lieberman decrees: taxation of disposables and sweet drinks. As expected, environmentalists were up in arms against the disposable rescinding, while health faddists protested again the repeal of the tax on sweet drinks. Minister Smotrich is not one to be alarmed by such hues and cries, besides which this issue is a very part of the coalition agreement which encompassed all of the members. Thus, very soon, the announcement to abolish these two taxes will go into effect, having been the opening shot against the wave of rising prices in the economy.
Let us make some order: the subject of disposables, as the rise in the price of sugar, is not of Israeli origin. There are other countries fighting this battle. If the Ministry of Environment would have initiated the price rise of disposables and the Health Ministry the fight against the use of sweet drinks, we might suspect that their interests were altruistic. But since the past Treasury Minister — what a pleasure to write "past" — was the one who initiated them, it was not out of ecological or health motives: it is not too far-fetched that he asked his advisors to find weak spots by the chareidi public where he could strike a blow to their pockets, and they found these two targets as part of the wave of decrees which he planned to terrorize the lives of his sworn enemies.
Disposables harm the environment, but they constitute a mere 6% of the total nonbiodegradable plastic products. Thus, even if their usage did drop, the ecological benefit was minimal. If he truly lost sleep over the damage to the environment, he could have boosted the use of biodegradable disposables and lowered the taxation on them, making them more attractive to the consumer.
The same applies to sweet beverages, which are surely unhealthy, except that the moment he taxed diet drinks as well, which have not been proven to be unwholesome, it was apparent that his deep concern for the public health was not the reason behind the tax, but the aforementioned motive. The Treasury was enriched by hundreds of millions of shekalim. The companies which produced and imported those products made a bonanza at the public expense and raised their prices way beyond the tax imposed upon them. The economy entered an inflationary spiral, and it is good that this evil man, vengeful and resentful, was ejected to the back benches of the Opposition with the hope that he will be bored there for many years to come.
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