Westminster City Council, presumably in a quiet moment when there was nothing more important to do, worked out that it costs £100,000 to remove chewing gum from their streets each year; 10p a time apparently. A deep clean would cost around £9m – quite a good investment in these times of austerity don’t you think?
Maybe they should appoint some Gum Wardens to patrol the streets and catch the offenders and then get them to clean up their mess.
SAGA Magazine with the aid of their “popular panel” attempted to turn this information into a more strategic policy. Over 80% of their respondents supported a gum levy. Someone then worked out that a 1p tax per piece of gum would raise £10m. A larger tax of 10p would raise £100m.
I guess that means a £1 levy would raise £1 billion; now we are on our way to solving the debt crisis. Alex Ferguson eat your heart out – we are on to you.
The Wrigley Company commissioned their own research into this idea and (surprise, surprise) found that more people would be likely to drop their gum if they were taxed on paying for the clean up. Looks like we are all coming to a sticky end.
How many more things that we don’t like could we tax to solve the credit crunch ?
GrumbleSmiles 
Another excellent cartoon.
A sticky end is in for us all if American food maker Kraft have their way. They have opened a new gum research centre in Switzerland aimed at coming up with new gum flavours, that will increase gum sales throughout the world.
What will the pavements be like then?
Every time I walk along a pavement now I think of this cartoon .