The City Council unanimously voted (8-0) this week to end the fee established decades ago on common forms of entertainment.
Starting in the 1940s, many U.S. cities were banning activities like pinball machines, under the argument that they were bilking coins from children. The machines were associated with gambling (because early forms of these machines were gambling devices), and in turn, they were tied to organized crime. That was the situation in Seattle, where suppliers of pinball machines and jukeboxes were suspected of blowing up each other’s warehouses, and threatening elected officials and public figures. Instead of banning the machines, Seattle set up a fee system to control them.
Had no idea that the pinball industry was so cutthroat back in the day.
Or are you not aware of the caliber of disaster
Indicated by the presence of apool tablepinball machine in your community
Well, ya got trouble my friend…Trouble
Right here inRiver CitySeattle
With a capital “T” and that rhymes with “P” and that stands for pinballOh wow you have dredged up some very deep memories from my childhood. Haven’t thought about the Music Man in years…
Oh yeah. It was crazy.
Cool! I mean with the amount of money it was generating it seems like a no brainer to offer even a little assistance for businesses. I wasn’t aware of the soda tax!
It was a pretty big deal. Most grocery stores bitched about it and protested by giving an explanation of why sugary soda cost more. The beverage companies then got together and made sure a soda tax could not happen in the rest of the state. They framed it as making sure that grandma could afford her groceries. She can afford her soda now but probably not her necessary diabetes medication.
I’d love to know how affective those preventative taxes are for reducing consumption. Same thing happened with tobacco products across the country and now people are still using tobacco at high rates but just complaining about the cost.
I don’t know if there’s good data on the sugary drinks tax yet, but tobacco taxes have absolutely greatly reduced tobacco use. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228562/ From the intro of that article:
Tobacco taxation, passed on to consumers in the form of higher cigarette prices, has been recognized as one of the most effective population-based strategies for decreasing smoking and its adverse health consequences
Thanks for linking this! That’s cool to see that it’s an effective deterrent, but also looks like it might not change the behavior of long term users.
However, there is a striking lack of evidence about the impact of increasing cigarette prices on smoking behavior in heavy/long-term smokers, persons with a dual diagnosis and Aboriginals
