Obama's Sugary Drink Tax

A tax on soda and other sugary drinks is "an idea that we should be exploring," President Obama tells Men's Health magazine. The Bloomberg wire manages to pass along the comment without any reference whatsoever to Mr. Obama's pledge in the first presidential debate and repeatedly during the course of the campaign, "if you make less than $250,000, less than a quarter-million dollars a year, then you will not see one dime's worth of tax increase." Mr. Obama has already raised tobacco taxes, so maybe he meant that if you make less than $250,000 a year and don't smoke or drink soda or Gatorade, you won't see one dime's worth of tax increase. But that's not what he said during the campaign. The New York Times has already come out in favor of a sugary drink tax, though, as FutureOfCapitalism.com wrote earlier, it hasn't explained what is particularly nefarious about drinks loaded with sugar as opposed to say, cupcakes, or cotton candy, or other sugary treats that are constituted as solids rather than liquids. Or, even, say newspaper food sections that encourage the consumption of those items.