Some undoubtedly -- probably several thousand. But think about almost $4 billion added to Americans' budgets. That's a lot of money.
We often talk about the "tax" on Americans by increased oil prices caused by problems in the Middle East. Well, the sugar tax is no less burdensome and it's just as easily reduced.
The government has no place in favoring one industry over another. The result is that some Americans are penalized to give an advantage to the others. That's a government policy that's pretty hard to defend. It's nothing but economic affirmative action.
The problem with this type of analysis is that it results in what we have now: The economy is unable to generate jobs. Why? Because so much of the economic activity of actually creating wealth is happening outside the US, thanks to our trade policies.
Well, there’s a little problem with that. When the only thing on which we focus is how cheaply someone can buy something, rather than worry about who will have any money to pay for anything, sooner or later we discover (as we are since 2009) that jobs & wages don’t come back.
There’s a reason why we have an unprecedented number of people who are pulling down hundreds of billions of dollars in transfer payments - because the US economy isn’t producing prior levels of wealth, aside from rent-seeking thimbleriggers on Wall Street and their step-n-fetchits in DC. Trade deficits aren’t funny money. They’re made out of real money. That’s wealth that is leaving the US economy and being exported to other countries. Economists have ignored the effects of these huge, systemic imbalances in trade models for decades... claiming that the money will come back in investments, blah, blah, blah... which assumed that the US dollar and US debt markets would remain attractive places to invest when our economy hollowed out. In an ongoing theatre of dark irony, economists are “surprised” at the “unexpected” poor economic results in their macro models of what the US economy should be generating for wages and jobs.
Only economists could be surprised. To anyone who has been tallying up how many companies, products, technologies and economic sectors have been sent off-shore, it comes as no surprise.
Quite frankly, there’s huge and growing problems with the entire field of economics. Their models of how macro-economics works are clearly broken, irretrievably so. They have no predictive skill, and as such I’d be highly suspect of any predictions of consumer benefit economists make. Their models didn’t predict the recent recession. Their models said that the housing implosion would be “contained.” Once their models and data showed that we were in fact in a recession, their models said that job growth would be roaring back by a year ago. Their models said that unemployment would peak at just a bit over 8% by passing the stimulus. Their models didn’t predict the level of price declines in either the national housing markets, or regional markets.
Two Nobel-winning economists rode their predictions on sovereign debt issues down into the ground in the Long Term Capital Management debacle, which, BTW, set the stage for the Wall Street bailouts of 2008 until now.
Shall I go on with their predictions?
The favorite word in news stories surrounding economic news is “unexpected.” Why would anyone be gullible enough to see the abysmal track record of macro-economic predictions and yet believe an economist when he tells you that the American consumer will benefit by “$X amount of money...?”
One more thing:
You said “...the sugar tax is no less burdensome and it’s just as easily reduced.”
The economy doesn’t run on sugar, and it has limited knock-on effects to the US economy. Trying to compare the two is utterly silly. Without oil, we couldn’t fight wars. F-15E’s don’t take to the sky on Dr. Pepper made with real sugar.
Let's set aside how many jobs could be created if the four billion dollars was spent elsewhere, because we cannot see past our noses.