Real people eat real licorice.

Hooray for regressive taxation!!!

Not only is this tax going to impact lower-income people more than it will middle and high-income folks it's going to be confusing as hell for business owners to collect.

It remains unfortunate that the governor and legislature remains perennially incapable of provide real leadership on our state's system of taxation. I may drop dead from excitement when a WA State pol actually tries to get a progressive income tax passed in this state. Thank goodness it's not likely to happen before I reach my 70s or 80s.

Kit-kat is a a "mini-pastry" emirite?

Holy crap, that's a proufoundly stupid definition.

Also, any definition that doesn't include so-called "energy bars" (which are just candy with a higher price tag) is a joke.

"RedVines: Now With Flour!"

Thank GOD they didn't touch my Kit Kat bar!! Maybe this will make someone bring back the 10:30 Bar from the late 70's early 80's!?!?

Now? Red Vines have always had flour. And therefore Not Candy, but part of a balanced breakfast when washed down with a bottle of Brawndo.

The "false negatives" are amusing, but the "false positives" are truly absurd. Beef jerky, for example, is an unrefrigerated, flourless mixture of sugar and "other ingredients," sold as "bars" or "pieces."

The nice thing about wine gums, especially the good ones they sell in Canada, is that they have flour in them.

Yum!

The definition of "candy" should also be extended to include most breakfast cereals, say, anything with more than 8 grams of sugars per serving size, and any "juice" that is not 100% the juice it says in the name (i.e., "cranberry juice" that's 80% pear, apple, or white grape juice).

@10, oh, for chrissakes. Wine gums do not have fucking flour in them. Starch is not flour. Is there ANYTHING in your head that's true?

#11 forget serving sizes, which can be comically small on these types of products, and just define it as anything over N% sugar content by weight? Any false positives there?

@13, same difference. As long as you specify x grams per y serving size, that IS percentage. All cereals, I think, have the same mandated "serving size", which is indeed ludicrously small one ounce, or 28 grams) -- but if you're comparing them to each other it doesn't matter.

I was trying to roughly mark out a number that's broad enough to allow cereals that have real fruit in them, which can push the sugar number up. Note that I am not talking about Raisin Bran, which is PACKED with added sugar on top of raisins -- well over half the product by weight is sugar.

Tax the fuck out of it.

The sugar content of coke is around 9.9% by weight, according to my back of the napkin calculations (using 1.1 g/mL as the density of coke).

Working with a nutrition label just now with the serving size in non-metric and the sugar content in metric also has made me keenly aware of just how difficult it is to tell just how much crap is in your food.

By the given definition, rock candy is not candy.

You're welcome.

@12 - not the US ones. those suck.

Fuck it, couldn't they just accomplish the same thing by taxing all the sweeteners? That is at least something manageable and relatively immutable.

@17, Canadian wine gums DO NOT HAVE FLOUR IN THEM.

They're the SAME PRODUCT. Maynards, Cadbury -- the wine gums you buy in Canadian stores are the same as the ones you buy here. There are no "US ones".

I love it when you go out of your way to argue and argue and argue about something you know absolutely nothing about. Even your "special subject" -- all things Canadian. In fact, you are more often wrong about things Canadian than anything else. Remember that book, the "Canadian edition", you were going on about, the one that doesn't exist in any Canadian library?

From a Canadian website selling Maynard's wine gums:

"Ingredients: glucose syrup, sugar, modified starch, gelatin, malic acid, acetic acid, flavourings, glazing agents, colours (Allura Red AC, Carmoisine, Quinoline Yellow, Green S)".

No flour.

@19 - most aren't made in Canada, moron. You'd know that if you'd ever lived there.

@18: I have two theories for why that wasn't suggested.

First, American politicians are in love with retain sales taxes, and can't seem to understand the idea of a tax whose burden gets passed on. Many politicians think that corporate income taxes only affect corporate profits, but in reality, much of the tax burden will get passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices. Similarly, maybe they don't understand that taxing sweeteners will cause companies to increase the prices of products using them?

Second, the (federal) government massively subsidizes corn syrup and other domestic sweeteners. So maybe some state politicians think it would be circuitous to enact a tax which basically cancels out a federal subsidy?

What about baking chocolate which isn't purchased as snack food but as an ingredient?

I'm for a reasonable tax increase to properly pay for government, but it's this type of mis-governance that makes our legislative bodies huge jokes.

Pretty lazy to rely on someone else's definition of candy without fully understanding their parameters. How do you accurately collect a tax if you can't delineate what your taxing? How do you project supposed revenues for budget purposes? Clearly it can't be done.

This idea is way too permature to be taken seriously and should be an embarrassment to whoever proposed it.

Just to be clear: no wine gums anywhere in the world are made with flour.

The Maynards wine gums I quoted the actual ingredients list from are made in the UK. They ARE the ones sold in Canada. They contain no flour, contrary to your assertion @10.

YOU said "sold in Canada". YOU said "contain flour". You are just simply 100% wrong.

Your unbelievable lack of knowledge of Canada is unprecedented among actual Canadians, and is even lower than that of most Americans -- dare I say most sentient beings. How do you do it? How can you possibly have lived in Canada and yet acquired so many false beliefs about it?

It's not a huge deal; it's just candy. But the pattern is. Why are you so often wrong? Why do you so often lie? Why, when you are challenged on facts, when you are wrong, do you continue to writhe and twist and pretend you said something else? Why can't you just say "huh, I could have sworn they had flour in them, I GUESS I WAS WRONG"?

I don't understand why the governor would intentionally exempt hydrogenated-oil-soaked Hostess snack cakes, while sticking a comparatively healthy Theo chocolate bar (fewer calories overall, no artificial ingredients, and rich enough that you actually eat it slowly and "2 servings" actually last two days) with a 40-cent tax.

40 cents can be a purchase-affecting figure; this could eat into the sales of legitimately expensive candy (based on cost of ingredients) from small (and low-profit-margin) local manufacturers and nudge consumers back toward corn-syrupy Milky Ways with their negligible 7-cent tax.

Is this tax supposed to be a sin tax? Why does the presence of flour matter? Is a donut better for you than licorice? Maybe I'm missing something here.

And Fnarf, my brain is still reeling from the time Will (In Seattle?) claimed Elliott Bay would have vastly superior light-rail access at Pike/Pine than in Pioneer Square.

@27, yes, that was him. And the best thing is, I'm quite certain he still believes it -- or feels the need to defend it to the death even if he doesn't. Reality doesn't mean a thing to him -- only the positions he's staked out that he erroneously believes delineate the type of person he wishes to be perceived as. Note the vociferousness with which he defends the iPhone and iPad, even though he owns neither. Or the way he shifts his identity -- "I'm a Canadian", "I'm a Texan", "I'm from Pennsylvania" "I'm from Santa Barbera" -- when he thinks it suits his argument. Or the way he randomly injects unrelated information about, say, his investment portfolio into virtually any thread. It's clinical, I tell you. The stupidity and incorrect facts (always accompanied by "actually") and lies and defensiveness are just the beginning.

@27 - the nearest exit for Pioneer Square is further in walking distance from the train set than it is from the station next to Pike/Pine.

Try measuring it as you get off the train - not as the crow flies but literal steps. People have to physically move from point A to point B ... and they are lazy.

@28 - I'm in your head space. Deal with it.

See what I mean?

What the hell does "further from the train set" mean?

You are aware that there's no light rail station on Capitol Hill yet? So why do you continue to refer to it in the present tense?

You're a deeply damaged lying piece of shit fuckhead garbage human being, Will. Deal with it.

Still waiting to hear what kind of wine gums those are, by the way.

We actually do not expect much confusion over this issue among retailers because if this legislation passes, we will provide them with a list that identifies both taxable candy products and nontaxable candy-like products. Flour is excluded from the candy definition so products such as cookies are not taxable. This is a standard definition already being used by many states. If a product is not on the list, we will encourage retailers to ask us if the product is taxable or not, and they can rely on our response.

Mike Gowrylow
Department of Revenue

@32, can you confirm that Twix are not considered candy by the state of Washington? How can you possibly justify that?

Will, you are aware that the Capitol Hill light rail station will be REALLY far from Pike/Pine, AREN'T YOU? Haven't you claimed to live on Capitol Hill? Have you by any chance noticed the 2-square-block hole in the ground at Broadway, Olive, and Denny?

Fnarf, I would have a much easier time shrugging Will's lunacy off if ALL of Seattle's urban dysfunctions didn't stem from this kind of "my gut knows best so I won't do any real research" / "that's the way we do things in The Northwest (tm)" bullshit.

Mike Gowrylow from the Department of Revenue,

I'd love to hear your thoughts on my concern @25.

The nearest FUTURE station entrance to the new EBBC location is going to be at Nagle Place and East Denny. That's 0.3 miles on foot. The nearest EXISTING station entrance to EBBC's current location is at 3rd and Yesler; that's 0.3 miles on foot. Or 5th and Jackson; that's 0.3 miles on foot.

Will's use of the term "train set" makes me think maybe he's playing with his Lionels.

@35, I take your point, but Will's truly a special case. Remember, he seriously touts his role as a political mover and shaker here; to this day he thinks that HE got the mayor elected, through his skillful "pre-memeing the word stream" (his phrase), by which I gather he means going to various bars and muttering crap that no one pays attention to.

I mean, a lot of people in Seattle DO that, and a lot of them think they belong to some sort of neglected minority, but not too many of them think they're communicating in that way.

In response to @33 (and @25), the use of flour to differentiate candy from non-candy food products is the result of a national debate conducted by the Streamlined Sales Tax Project, a consortium of states working together to ease the burden of tax collection by businesses that operate in multiple states, including online and mail-order retailers. The group struggled with how to define candy, and ultimately agreed to define it as the article describes. Using flour to differentiate between a candy bar and a cookie may not be a perfect solution, but it is clear and the best one the group could develop. Washington is a member of the consortium and must adhere to this definition.

@41, I'm sorry, but that's really lame. Better to just tax cookies, then.

How long before candy bar makers start adding trace amounts of flour to get around this?

And what about those "energy bars" that are nutritionally indistinguishable from candy bars?

Mike Gowrylow... This isn't a sin tax (which for cigarettes vastly exceeds the normal sales tax rate) so much as an end to the "food-as-necessity" sales tax exemption for food items in the grey area between necessity and luxury.

So why target the so-called Streamlined Sales Tax Project's comically narrow definition of candy while exempting cookies, cakes, Twinkies, and everything else in that gray area? Is it based on the perception that a "baked good" is somehow more "wholesome" than a frivolous candy indulgence? Then why not base the exemption upon the presence or absence of certain hydrogenated oils, artificial flavorings, and preservatives rather than upon the presence or absence of something as arbitrary as "flour?"

Most of the baked goods department, chocolate sans cheap fillers, and my beloved Odwalla bars would all pass the exemption test. Hostess snack cakes, Twix bars, Chips Ahoy cookies, and Fnarf's hated PowerBars would all fail.

Returning to my example of Theo, which essentially produces a single type of product: chocolate. A retailer carrying their products would need to program their registers to begin taxes all of their products EXCEPT for the one with little flakes of French bread crust, which would require a additional programmed exemption. How is that "streamlined," exactly?

(And before anyone calls my suggestion a "poor tax..." 1) I think ALL sales taxes are taxes on the poor, that we should be advocating a state income tax in place of any of these nickel-and-dime budget fixes; 2) Washington's failure to exempt clothing necessities from the sales tax weighs far more heavily upon the poor than this candy-surcharge ever could; and 3) Didn't you all justify the bag-tax proposition as one that could "modify behavior" so as not to become a tax on the poor (the same principle applies here, with health-care cost benefits as a bonus).