Seattle's Soda Tax Goes Horribly Wrong

Once again Seattle lawmakers have shown their pre-existing vulnerability to social contagion with predictably embarrassing results. Like nearly every cockamamie scheme cooked up by their fellow travelers on the West Coast, Messed Coast, almost all have backfired spectacularly. And each promulgator has a deadly comorbidity – Leftism.

Plastic bag bans. Replacing those plastic bags with their thicker plastic bags. Gun “control.” Ammo “control.” Nuclear-free zones. Global warming. Global cooling. Climate change. Net-zero. Preschool teachers sacrifice children to Satan. Boys have babies. Let’s tax weed. Let’s bail out weed shops. Seattle’s CHAZ CHOP was a Summer of Love – with a body count. Riots are mostly peaceful. Give needles and crack pipes to addicts. Allow people to walk the Seattle streets with a “bump” or two of heroin and fentanyl for “harm reduction.” Police are horrible people. Criminals are not horrible people.

Their faux do-goodism results in hot-and-cold-running bodies on the sidewalks of Seattle. “Mommy, is he dead?” Mom, with her hand on her Glock and her eye on the heaving clump of clothes, urges her on. “Keep walking and make sure you’ve got your pepper spray in your hand, honey. Safety off.”

Seattle swells and socialists replace your good sense with their dumb ideas because think they’re just better and smarter than you. In reality, they’re just organized gaggles of Mrs. Kravitz-like snoops with a propensity for dumbness. They think it’s their business to run your lives with a woke weathervane instead of doing their basic jobs and leaving you alone.

And now comes the fall-out from the social contagion of the last decade.

In 2015, Berkeley, Calif.—of course—became the first city in the entire United States of America to put an extra tax on evil sugary drinks because we’re all too fat and it was their job to make sure we got more fiber in our diets, wore Birkenstocks, and stopped eating prime cuts of tasty moo moos.

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire faux “Republican” who became New York City mayor, picked up the idea to “save” his subjects and ramrodded through this dumb idea while wagging his reproving forefinger.

It wasn’t long after – 2017 to be exact – that Seattle’s child molester mayor, Ed Murray, thought to himself, “How do I get more money to spend for pet projects, change the subject, and screw the taxpayers while attempting to look virtuous? Aha! Eureka! Soda tax!” The Berkeley bad idea was all over his Googly machine, so he took out his crayon, crossed out the city name, and barked at his aide to “get me rewrite!” The vote was 7-1 and – voila!– Seattle became another victim.

Now comes judgment day for the people who always yammer on about negative externalities but conveniently forget that part about unintended consequences.

A study, comparing Seattle to Portland, the latter of which shockingly didn’t sign on to this dumb idea, finds that Seattleites have responded by switching from sugary sodas to beer. With alacrity. And why not? Sure, beer and wine are taxed, but not to the extent of sugary drinks are at 28 cents per 16 ounces. Greedy bastards.

Indeed, the we’re-saving-you-from-yourself crowd might be shocked to learn that 16 ounces of sugary soda are about 140 calories versus the roughly 200 calories for an equal amount of beer. If you’re into double IPAs, don’t look because it’s almost double the number of calories.

The study found that after “the implementation of the Seattle SBT [dumb soda tax], there was a sustained increase in the volume sold of beer in Seattle relative to the comparison site of Portland, reflected in a 5% and 7% increase in the respective one- and two-year post-tax periods.”

It looks as if beer sales supplanted not only sugary drinks in sales but wine too. Apparently, those chicks got a look at the prices and calorie counts of Hillary’s favorite Chardonnay and gave up their wine spritzers for beer!

“The result in this study of a significant sustained increase in volume sold of beer following the implementation of the Seattle SBT suggests that SSBs and beer are substitutes,” the study concludes.

The study’s authors, who are from the University of Illinois, so they should know better, also conclude that perhaps Seattle’s greedy leaders “should take into consideration these potential unintended consequences in implementation plans for future SSB taxes. As part of this process, it is important to generate further evidence on the extent of potential increases in excessive drinking and any associated harms.”

We guess that their great idea for the next public policy fad will be prohibition.

Or, the social contagion addicts could just shut up and leave us alone.