One of the most thought-provoking magazines on the newsstand gives an argument this month against soda taxes. The argument made here is both in how regressive taxes have been traditionally been spent in the US but also includes the unfair choices of what is being taxed:

While low-income people’s fizzy drinks are getting socked with taxes, most of the sugar-laden beverages favored by the upper middle-class and the rich are conspicuously exempt.

In Philadelphia, drinks that are at least 50 percent juice are excluded from the 1.5-cent-per-ounce fee. The bottled smoothies that line Whole Foods’s shelves? Tax-free, even when they contain more sugar than a Pepsi.

Beverages that are more than 50 percent milk are also exempt, a loophole big enough to drive a tanker truck full of venti white-chocolate mochas through.

Source: Against the Soda Tax | Jacobin