Nanny State 'Mini Me' Berkeley Tries to Tax Away Obesity, NPR Gushes

First, they came for Coca Cola…

Public health advocates have argued that one of the best ways to fight obesity would be to tax the sugary drinks that science has implicated as a big part of the problem.

While many states and cities have tried to find ways to tax sodas and other sugar-sweetened beverages, only Berkeley, Calif., has succeeded. A grass-roots coalition, funded in part by Bloomberg Philanthropies, managed to get 76 percent of voters to support a soda tax, which passed in November 2014 and was the first of its kind in the U.S.

Now, researchers say the tax seems to be working in one important way: From May through June — the first three months of its implementation — soda prices in Berkeley increased seven-tenths of a cent per ounce more than in other cities, the researchers at the University of California, Berkeley found. That means that retailers are passing about 70 percent of the extra cost from the 1-cent-per-ounce tax on to consumers.

That’s the way excise taxes are supposed to work — they make it more likely that consumers will see and feel the extra cost for a specific product.

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There was a time in the not-too-distant past when American liberals only wanted to tax much of the stuff, not all of the stuff. That was before Americans made it clear that we’re still fans of liberty, the pursuit of happiness and all the other “Hey, we fought a revolution over this” things that the progressives who have hijacked American liberalism loathe. Now they want to use the state and its powers of taxation to ideologically and physically engineer people to adhere to principles which free people instinctively find distasteful (reverse pun intended).

Berkeley serves as a good place to see what will be happening in other progressive cities, as it is the mothership for commies in America. In just half a century, the city known for its free-loving, free-living hippies is now being run by those hippies, and they’re all bitter fans of oppressive government.

We don’t have enough time to wait for their kids to rebel against them, the poor dears will probably be too hungry fight back.

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