The soda tax is a sugar rush for bad policy

One of the most shared photos I've ever seen on social media came from inside a Seattle Costco, and it perfectly captures what’s wrong with Olympia’s latest policy obsession.

On the shelf: a 35-pack of Coke priced at $10.99. Just below it: a line item labeled “City of Seattle Sweetened Beverage Recovery Fee” — $7.35. The tax alone is nearly as much as the soda itself.

That’s not satire. That’s what happens when lawmakers decide that taxing something politically unpopular counts as solving a complex problem.

Now, Washington state legislators want to take this experiment statewide, arguing that a new 3-cent sugar-sweetened beverage tax will improve health outcomes and fight hunger. It sounds noble. It sounds decisive. And it’s deeply disconnected from reality.

Seattle’s soda tax has been in place since 2018. Prices went up — sharply — because distributors passed the tax straight through to consumers, exactly as economists predicted. What didn’t happen was a neat reduction in sugar consumption or a measurable public-health breakthrough.

In fact, research shows that when soda becomes more expensive, people don’t stop consuming sugar — they substitute. A University of Georgia study found soda taxes reduce soda purchases but do not reduce overall sugar consumption, because people shift to other sweets or shop elsewhere. A peer-reviewed study of Seattle’s tax found evidence that some consumers substituted toward beer, raising obvious questions about unintended health consequences.

Philadelphia’s soda tax followed a similar path. Revenues came in below projections as consumers crossed city lines to avoid the tax, undermining the programs the tax was supposed to fund. Globally, the evidence is mixed at best: soda taxes reliably raise prices, but their impact on obesity and long-term health outcomes is far less clear.

Yet legislators keep doubling down.

Why? Because soda is a convenient villain. It’s easy to demonize, easy to tax, and politically safe to punish. No one in Olympia loses sleep over raising the cost of a product they don’t think voters will defend.

But convenience is not policy, and symbolism is not governance.

Soda taxes are also regressive, meaning they fall hardest on lower-income households — the very people lawmakers claim they want to help. A tax that adds dollars to a grocery bill doesn’t become progressive just because the revenue is spent on good intentions. Someone still pays at the register.

This is the deeper problem: the belief that government can micromanage personal behavior through the tax code. If soda is taxable because it’s unhealthy, what’s next? Candy? Snack foods? Ice cream? Fast food? At some point, the logic collapses under its own weight — because you can’t tax every imperfect choice out of existence.

Hard problems like obesity, food insecurity, and health disparities don’t have easy villains.

The Costco photo isn’t just about soda. It’s about a governing mindset that treats taxation as a shortcut to virtue. Raise the price, issue a press release, move on.

But Washington can’t tax its way to better health. And pretending otherwise only guarantees more shelf tags, more surcharges, and more frustration — without solving the problems lawmakers claim to care about.