HuffingtonPost has a piece up detailing the food lobby's full court press over a federal soda/sweetener tax:
About $5 million of the money was spent on a national advertising campaign aimed at Capitol Hill lawmakers and promoting a newly formed coalition called Americans Against Food Taxes . The group bills itself on its website as a coalition of "responsible individuals, financially-strapped families, [and] small and large businesses" but its 400-plus membership list is dominated by industry heavyweights such as Burger King Corporation, Coca Cola, Pepsico and Domino's Pizza.
Sounds like they're just getting started. This is par for the course with taxes on the federal level, you can't even mention one without sending the affected industry's lobbyists into a frenzy-and why we're in such a revenue pickle generally. Yet, some insiders suggest that the beverage folks have an ace in the hole-"the sugar guys":
In other words, the sugar lobby, which is unique in the agricultural world for having maintained strict import quotas on foreign products despite living in a world devoted to "free trade," has kept their work against the soda tax off their paperwork and thus out of public sight. But its invisibility doesn't lessen its ferocity or, so far, its effectiveness.
And it certainly doesn't help that, as HuffPo, myself, and the New York Times have observed, any attempt to enact a soda tax in the Senate Finance Committee runs up against the reality that the committee's Chairman and Ranking Member are from Montana (sugar beet country) and Iowa (corn syrup country) respectively. But HuffPo's Christine Spoler and Joseph Eaton (with the Center for Public Integrity) go on to point out that, in fact, farm states are way over-represented on the Senate Finance Committee generally-depending on how you count them more than half come from states with large agricultural interests that might not take kindly to food taxes of any type.
