According to the AP, “Lightfoot on Tuesday became the city’s first black woman and openly gay person elected to lead the nation’s third-largest city, an overwhelming victory over political veteran and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.” Preckwinkle never had a chance because of her disastrous sugar tax, which was in effect for a few months before it was repealed because of public outcry. Ostensibly the tax was intended as means to curb unhealthy dietary habits; however, knowing that the demand for sugary drinks is notoriously inelastic to price (for most), like cigarettes, the tax was meant to fill Cook County’s budgetary gap under the guise of wanting to improve the health of the public.
Allow me to explain. The tax was an additional $0.01 on each ounce of targeted drink (soda in a bottle or at the fountain–including diet, sports drinks, some juice drinks, energy drinks, flavored water, coffee if it’s sweetened, etc.). At first, this may not seem like much but consider this typical scenario. I don’t drink soda but I do like Gatorade and load up when it’s on sale, which it usually is somewhere for a fairly routine 10 for $10 of 32 oz bottles. It doesn’t take a Leibniz to figure out that buying Gatorade on sale results in a 30% tax on a sports drink–not really the same thing as trying to deter someone from consuming a daily Big Gulp of extra-corn-syrup-added Coke. Um, no thank you! I simply shifted getting my Gatorade from Amazon in powder form for a fraction of the price compared to bottled. While I ultimately benefited by changing my market for goods, the tax was in general profoundly unfair and really targeted the poor. Needless to say, almost everyone in the county thought the same. Preckwinkle got destroyed on this single issue. She never had a chance! Chicago got smart!