Source: http://www.foodpolitics.com/2016/04/soda-politics-gets-presidential-sanders-v-clinton-on-soda-taxes/
Talk about soda politics! I can hardly believe it but soda taxes have become an issue in the Democratic primary campaign.
This started when Hillary Clinton came out in favor of Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney’s proposed soda tax.
I’m very supportive of the mayor’s proposal to tax soda to get universal pre-school for kids. I mean, we need universal pre-school. And if that’s a way to do it, that’s how we should do it.
Given the Clinton Foundation’s long-standing relationship with Coca-Cola, this was unexpected.
In short order, Bernie Sanders distanced himself from her position:
I do not support Mayor Kenney’s plan to pay for this program with a regressive grocery tax that would disproportionately affect low-income and middle-class Americans. I was especially surprised to hear Hillary Clinton say that she is “very supportive” of this proposal. Secretary Clinton has vowed not to raises taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 per year. For reasons that are not clear, she has chosen to abandon her pledge by embracing a tax that targets the poor and the middle class while going easy on the wealthy. That approach is wrong for Philadelphia, and wrong for the country.
This, in turn, induced Paul Krugman, who seems to have little love for Sanders anyway, to weigh in:
It does seem worth pointing out that progressivity of taxes is not the most important thing, even when your concern is inequality. Notably, Nordic count…