In woke California city, insidious plot to double tax helping no one but fat cats

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Gulp.

Berkeley has a long list of pressing problems: Poor basic service delivery. Decrepit infrastructure. Budget deficits. Crime and public safety. Filthy, sprawling homeless encampments.

Yet city voters will be asked to double a soda tax that sends money to low-level priorities with scant apparent oversight and poor spending controls.

That’s cuckoo for cocoa puffs. It’s also very self-interested on the part of those who benefit.

Measure AA would double the city’s sugary-drink tax, adopted in 2014, from 1 cent per ounce to 2 cents; the tax on a typical can of soda thus would jump from 12 to 24 cents. For nonprofits that slurp up taxpayer money, it’s an addictive levy.

The leading fat cat, Healthy Black Families, has collected more than $2.2 million in Berkeley soda-tax proceeds since 2014, the California Post reported. The nonprofit’s work includes a program called “Thirsty for Change!”, along with cooking seminars and tours of farmers markets.

Really? These are priorities for tax dollars in a deficit-plagued city? 

And then there are financial irregularities. 

A review of Healthy Black Families’ records found conflicting compensation numbers, huge expenses that don’t add up and hundreds of thousands of dollars in mystery legal fees — causing what one analyst called “repeated failures in basic financial reporting” and another dubbed “incompetent.” 

Meanwhile, Berkeley’s soda-tax proceeds were also served to dubious causes, including $245,000 to teach “life skills” to day laborers and $125,000 for “Artists Against Soda.”

And advocates now want twice the money to be lavished on organizations that can’t explain their finances and programs of little-to-no benefit to general residents — much less to those who pay the soda tax? For what? To punish those who down sugary drinks despite scolds’ warnings not to?

And no, it’s not about “education”; Americans are well-aware that sugar’s not a health food. 

In Berkeley, though, there’s more: The tax-cravers are highly caffeinated.

On Nov. 3, city voters will also decide whether to tax spending (by hiking the city sales tax, by a half-cent per dollar) and raise property taxes (the latter to pay for arts programs and, of all the bad ideas, a public bank).

Unofficial Berkeley motto (h/t to iconic Coke branding): “Have a tax and a smile!”

Fact is, California’s liberal voters love to impose taxes for do-gooder-sounding policies when they think other people will pay.

And Berkeley carries the nickname Berserkely for a reason.

But doubling a dubious tax that already squanders scarce resources should be too much for even Berkeley residents to swallow.

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