Sanders’s big mistake is treating the soda tax as a mere source of revenue rather than as a policy in itself. The point of soda taxes is to guide people away from over-consuming a product that no one needs to live and that should be treated as an indulgence. Drinking a lot of soda promotes obesity and all of the health issues that come with it. The country’s widening waistline is a public health crisis that degrades Americans’ quality of life and promises to be a persistent drag on government budgets, too, because health programs help pay the bill for chronic conditions such as diabetes.

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Unsurprisingly, a nationwide soda tax in Mexico has shown that raising the cost of a product is an effective way to discourage consumption without resorting to more heavy-handed regulation. The United States has seen some success taxing tobacco products out of use, but the potential for taxes to shift consumption patterns is much more pronounced in the case of soda than in the case of tobacco, because sugar is less addictive than nicotine.

In fact, the New York Times’s Margot Sanger-Katz points out, though poorer people more likely to drink soda now, they are also more sensitive to price increases and, therefore, are the most likely to cut down on how much soda they drink in response to a soda tax. The results in Mexico bear this out. Soda taxes, then, are less regressive than they might initially seem, because low-income people respond to them by drinking less soda and avoiding the tax.

Moreover, the Philadelphia proposal would also offset the potential regressivity of the soda tax with a new social program that will benefit low-income families. Philadelphia has some pre-K programs in place, but a city-commissioned analysis found last year that a majority of 3- and 4-year-olds from families making below 300 percent of the poverty line are not getting pre-K services. Improving the quality and availability of pre-K services would be a significant benefit for these people.

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If there is a problem with the Philadelphia plan, it is that it does not take the policy’s logic far enough. Instead of funding universal pre-K, the revenue could be targeted more precisely at low-income people. The policy could be more precise about what it is trying to discourage, too. People might respond to the soda tax by substituting their soda intake with other sugary items, such as candy. Ideally, the government would tax sugar itself instead of one — albeit major — class of sugary products.