We've blogged many times on the idea of taxing sugary drinks to stem the obesity/diabetes epidemic. Go, for instance, here and here. Critics claimed that these so-called soda taxes would do little to improve health while hurting grocers, particularly small grocers, who would get pummeled by consumers cutting back on purchases of sugary drinks. Nonetheless some cities enacted soda taxes. One was Philadelphia. Preliminary research from last fall on the effect of the tax shows that sugary-drink consumption is down considerably without discernible impact on store sales. Read about it in this article by Philadelphia's health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley.
