Hillary Clinton said Wednesday she is “very supportive” of a plan by the mayor of Philadelphia to tax soda in order to pay for universal pre-school.
Clinton was speaking at a forum in Philadelphia hosted by the Mothers of the Movement, a gun control advocacy organization, and discussed replacing the “school to prison pipeline” with a “cradle to college” pipeline when the soda tax proposal came up.
“It starts early with working with families, working with kids, building up community resources — I’m very supportive of the mayor’s proposal to tax soda to get universal pre-school for kids,” Clinton said. “I mean, we need universal pre-school. And if that’s a way to do it, that’s how we should do it.”
In early March, the Democratic mayor of Philadelphia, Jim Kenney, introduced a plan to tax soda at three cents per ounce in order to fund a universal pre-K program.
But Clinton and Kenney may discover — like politicians before them — that even the best of intentions can’t protect the mayor’s proposal from the tricky politics of a soda.
Michael Nutter, Kenney’s predecessor, tried — and failed — to institute such a tax in Philadelphia. Most famously, New York City nearly melted down when former Mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to ban large soda containers, part of an effort to combat obesity.