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California, of All Places, Has Banned Soda Taxes. How a New Industry Strategy Is Succeeding.
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: July 22nd, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/upshot/california-banning...
For years, the soda industry had an ironclad strategy when a city wanted to enact a soda tax: Spend a lot of money, rally local businesses, and shoot it down. That strategy worked again and again, until it didnt. In 2014, Berkeley, Calif., passed the nations first tax on sugary drinks. Since then, eight communities, including three more cities in California, enacted similar bills. Now ... instead of fighting the ordinances city by city, [the beverage industry] is turning to states, trying to pass laws preventing any local governments from taxing their products. In California, the legislature passed a bill Thursday that will pre-empt any new local beverage or food taxes for 12 years. Arizona and Michigan have passed similar laws. In Oregon, the states grocers have collected enough signatures to bring a ballot initiative barring any taxes on grocery items. And legislators are considering pre-emption bills in other states, including Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Washington. In California, the arrival of the bill to pre-empt soda taxes ... came as a shock. The state has passed more soda taxes than any other, shepherded by progressive lawmakers who see them as ... a tool to fight obesity and diabetes. The irony is that the soda companies screamed very loudly about government overreach when soda taxes began to get passed, said Kelly Brownell, the dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. But now they are looking for the ultimate government overreach when it works in their favor.
Note: Learn how healthcare groups in California are fighting this measure in this Los Angeles Times article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption and health.
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