When Seattle's soda tax passed in July of last year, its proponents promised that it would accomplish all good things. Tacking on just 1.75 cents per ounce to sweetened beverages, said then mayor Ed Murray would not only encourage healthier consumption habits, but also generate enough revenue to subsidize trips to the farmers market, to pay for free community college, and even to roll back "white-privileged, institutional racism." On January 1, the tax went into full-effect, and while all those vaunted progressive goals no doubt are just over the horizon, Seattle shoppers are starting to see a more immediate effect of the tax: massive price increases. The cost of a typical can of coke is now 20 cents higher. That adds up fast: A typical 36-can case of soft drink is now $7.56 more expensive, nearly doubling the price at many retail outlets. Stores are only too willing to let customers know who is responsible for the cost increases. Local Seattle press and social media have been filled with images of Costco price tags that now bear a "City of Seattle Sweetened Beverage Recovery Fee" to make up for the new tax, along with an inscription that reads "this item is also available at our Tukwila and Shoreline locations without the City of Seattle Beverage Tax.
So far Seattle is sticking by its soda tax, which it is counting on to bring in $15 million in its first year. That revenue is intended to pay for a grab bag of progressive goodies, including more educational services, $2 million for subsidies to farmers market shoppers, $1.4 million in community college tuition assistance, and $500,000 to retrain beverage industry workers who lose their jobs. But a soda tax is a micro solution to a macro problem. The purveyance of teaspoon remedies is a hallmark of Clinton/Obama public policy (with some notable exceptions), and soda taxes are essentially neoliberalism at the municipal level: small-scale solutions to large problems relying on undependable market mechanisms. Is whatever revenue they provide really going to solve the enormous disinvestment in black and brown communities?
But the real knock on the soda tax is that the conversation it generates—the policy oxygen it consumes—far exceeds its relevance to the oppression of people of color in local communities. Soda taxation is a very meager substitute for a serious discussion of urban policy, or of economic policy responses to institutional racism. If our concern is revenue for local governments, we need to talk about federal and state aid, financed by broad-based taxes. If our concern is public health, imagine how low-income communities would benefit from an expanded network of community health clinics, as has been proposed by Bernie Sanders and James Clyburn. Or consider the changes in behavior—including consumption of sugar drinks—that follow from reductions in inequality and increases in living standards. When people have more money to spend, healthier food becomes more accessible.
All income brackets and races/ethnicities in the U.S. self-report consuming approximately the same amounts and types of calories, with middle-income people frequenting fast food establishments the most. Even if, on average, lower income people consume more soda, I question this narrow framing of sugar intake. Surely artisanal, small-batch cider or ice cream (or craft soda!) also contain excess sugar, but no public campaign surveils and shames foodies for their bespoke drinks and desserts.
The idea that somebody’s diet should be policed simply because she has less money in her wallet, or more weight on her body, is highly problematic. Soda tax campaigns almost always conflate weight and health, invoking the so-called obesity epidemic as if heavy necessarily means unhealthy. They also tend to conflate race and class, claiming to be especially concerned for (read: rescuing) people of color, as if being Black or Brown necessarily means “needing help from above.”
Stigmatizing and taxing people for drinking soda both distracts from the (far worse) industrial production of toxic exposures and alienates potential allies in the paramount battle against the real threat: corporate power. (After all, if everyone simply switches from Coke to Dasani, Coca-Cola Co. still wins, and people and the planet still lose.) We cannot spare our precious time and resources on soda taxes—of all things!—when living wages, affordable healthcare, and safe and clean workplaces, homes and neighborhoods are far more urgent concerns. Public health advocates should refocus their energies on stronger corporate regulations, relieving the downward pressure on wages, prohibiting offshore tax havens and preventing chemical intoxication of our environments, among other issues.
Promoting public health means supporting all people’s right to prepare pleasurable meals on their own terms, which requires reining in the corporations that are corrupting our government, poisoning our planet and quite seriously threatening our lives.
