Social authoritarians like to make people more reliant on government and then control what people do with the government assistance they are now reliant upon. It keeps those in control in positions of power. The most recent example is with government funding for food coming attached to strings telling people what they can buy with the money.

This is not new, only a restriction using the source is new. Prior to 2026, social authoritarians claimed they could control behavior using taxes and regulations. Make things so expensive people stop. It generally fails. When New York City hiked cigarette taxes it didn't lead to any reductions in smoking, it led to reductions in black market purchases and one man died because the mayor forced the police to crack down on sellers of "loosies" - cigarettes sold one at a time without sales tax.(1)

When even more progressive Oakland(2) declared war on soda, all their tax hikes did was increase sales outside the city limits.(3) Gas stations were harmed, not Pepsi. Wealthy elites - and if you work for any government in America you are wealthier than 99.9% of the entire world - don't understand human behavior of the poor. In the real world, people will drive to save money. Local small businesses got penalized but behavior did not change.

A new analysis drives the point home again, using a different proxy than direct sales, meaning a more nuanced result. The authors looked at 2015-2020 sales data from 7,300 Taco Bell locations nationwide and found that when it comes to affordable restaurants, sales didn't decline by 15 percent, as happened in mom-and-pop stores. Sales didn't decline at all. The pattern was duplicated in other areas that created arbitrary soda taxes, like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle.


Difference-in-differences model estimates of beverage calories purchased per transaction after implementation of taxes, individual items, conditional,(a) by location. The vertical dashed line represents the date of repeal for Cook County, IL. (a) Conditional on a transaction including a beverage item.

People didn't stop getting sodas at all. Poor people just spent more. That isn't progress, but it is progressive.

Citation: Rummo PE, Echenique JA, Wu E, Mijanovich T, Desai SM, Bragg MA, Weitzman BC, Elbel B, (2026) Impact of sugary drink taxes on beverage calories purchased in a national fast food restaurant chain: A quasi-experimental study. PLoS Med 23(4): e1004642. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1004642

NOTES:

(1) Cigarettes instead plummeted thanks to awareness and education of groups like ours, plus non-pharmaceutical harm reduction and smoking cessation tools like vaping without needing a doctor that fewer and fewer can afford due to government. Alcohol should be next, but it will take another generation.

(2) Oakland are considered militant progressives even for California. Even for the California coast. They have managed to acquire sports franchises from the NHL, MLB, NBA, and NFL and government managed to drive all of them back out of the city. They blame 'greedy corporations but the Sacramento Athletics fled Oakland three years before their new stadium in Las Vegas could be ready. A 13,000-person stadium in a more normal California city was better to the owner than a 57,000-person stadium in Oakland. Because the larger stadium only drew 10,000. For context, the Dodgers left Brooklyn in 1957 for Los Angeles because attendance was only 13,000 per game. Oakland drew 30 percent fewer fans than a team did with the country having 170,000,000 more people now.

(3) It was also arbitrary. Starbucks drinks were not taxed heavier even though they have far more sugar than Coca-Cola, which has the same amount of sugar as orange juice. Orange juice was also not taxed. But wealthy elites buy Starbucks and orange juice, so hypocrisy didn't get called out in their tribe.