Sugar Taxes Can Help Fund Cities

A New York Times op-ed sees the future as being fueled by taxes on sugar-sweetened drinks.

May 26, 2016

NEW YORK CITY – Earlier versions of taxes on sugar-sweetened drinks have failed with the exception of Berkeley, Calif., which approved a penny-per-ounce tax on soda and other beverages sweetened with sugar. In an op-ed in the New York Times, Mark Bittman, a fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists, posited that other locations will soon follow Berkeley’s example.

“The Berkeley tax ‘works’: Prices have gone up, and some stores have stopped selling taxed beverages altogether, although it’s too soon to tell whether consumption has declined or how much money has been generated,” he wrote. Other California cities—Albany, Oakland, Richmond and San Francisco—are also considering a tax on soft drinks. Britain will have a nationwide tax on soda in 2018.

Philadelphia is also on the brink of adding a tax on soft drinks, with a proposal to add 3 cents per ounce to sugared drinks as part of Mayor Jim Kenney’s budget. But instead of billing the tax as anti-obesity, supporters are framing it as anti-poverty. “Until now, every proposed soda tax has been sold first as a health measure; income from the tax has been secondary—destined for the general fund in Berkeley and, in Mexico, for establishing safe, free drinking water.

“Mayor Kenney’s plan is different. The tax is being pitched as one that will pay for services for the city’s needy, and especially children—community schools, universal prekindergarten (which has overwhelming support), parks, recreation centers, libraries—rather than as one that will discourage people from consuming a damaging product,” Bittman wrote.

“We are going to a source where there is substantial profit,” Kenney told Bittman, “and one that has the ability to take that hit and not skip a beat. They sell more of their product in poor communities than elsewhere, and for generations none of that profit was passed on to those communities. There is no downside to this other than that the three major soda companies may make a little less money.”

Bittman concluded that “the logic of taxing sugar-sweetened beverages has been clear for a decade; every delay in doing so means dooming another percentage of our children to the increased threat of diabetes and other diseases. As Philadelphia and other cities consider this move, the federal government should follow their lead.”

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