VIA THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER:
A proposed tax on sugary drinks in the District of Columbia has the Big Soda lobby all shook up.
Dozens of soft drink workers and advocates — many of them decked in the bright reds and blues of Coke and Pepsi — flooded the city council Friday to protest against a tax on high-sugar drinks in the District.
The bill’s sponsor, Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, says the tax will help the city fight what she says is rampant obesity. She wants to charge 1 cent per fluid ounce of sugary soft drinks and spend the money on healthy lunches in the city’s schools and other weight-watching programs. She expects to raise about $16 million.
More than one of every five Washingtonians is dangerously overweight, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control says.
Cheh says it’s a public health crisis.
“It’s particularly dramatic among children,” she said. “Doctors are telling us we’re seeing all sorts of new ailments among children that we would ordinarily see in adults — diabetes, hypertension — and if we carry on the way things are, the predictions are that this generation will be the first to have a shorter life span that the previous one.”
Cheh has been emboldened by first lady Michelle Obama, who has adopted childhood obesity as her pet cause.
The soft drink industry says the tax will punish poor families for whom soft drinks are a cheap alternative.
“Now is not the time to pass a regressive and discriminatory tax,” Coca-Cola mid-Atlantic spokesman Curtis Etherly told the Washington Examiner. “It’s going to push businesses out of the District.”
