Dear Coke, It’s not us, it’s you.

The American Beverage Association, lead by Coca-Cola, has plastered the city with its “grocery tax” campaign to mislead us into thinking Mayor Kenny’s proposed soda tax will annihilate our wallets at the checkout counter. Their rhetoric is as alarming by design as it is false.

The tax to fund much needed infrastructure investment and greatly expand quality Pre-K in Philadelphia is a tax on distributors only, not on consumers, and only applies to sugary drinks, and it’s very unlikely they would pass on the entirety of the tax. In Berkley, California, research shows only half of their 2014 tax reached consumers.

A ‘grocery tax’? Said the Daily News in their strong endorsement of the soda tax, “That’s like calling the cigarette tax a grocery tax because cigarettes are sold in supermarkets and grocery stores.”

So why the Chicken Little routine? Big Soda’s sky has been falling for quite some time and pointing to these kinds of taxes makes for good cover.

We’re all drinking less of it. A lot less of it, as it turns out, with Americans drinking 25% less of the stuff over the past twenty years.

Nevertheless, in 2012, the biggest soda companies posted $18 billion in profits.

No one likes taxes. But do you know who really doesn’t like taxes? Coke. And not just Mayor Kenny’s proposed tax on sugary drinks. Last year the IRS sent Coke a $3.3 billion bill (plus interest) for underreporting after a five-year audit of their 2007-09 returns. Coke was also named as one of 20 corporations hoarding hundreds of billions of dollars in offshore tax havens, according to the AFL-CIO.

Last year, the corporation got in hot water when it was revealed that they had been controlling a nonprofit “anti-obesity group” trying to convince people that obesity was due to lack of exercise and not dietary issues, despite hard science that says otherwise. (They even funded studies to try to prove that diet sodas were better for weight loss than water and paid “nutrition experts” to say that smaller cans of full calorie soda was a healthy treat.)

The troubles of the sugar soda trade are their own and have nothing to do with the proposed soda tax.

***

You could hear a pin drop.

Welling with emotion, one worker addressed the panel at the first Council Budget Hearing on Tuesday, down the street from the Coca-Cola plant. He alleged the soda tax would hurt his industry, hurt him and his family, he said, so find another way to fund Pre-K.

“I can’t face my kids and tell them Daddy got laid off.”

Gulp. The room fell utterly silent, even quieting the smirking executives in the back of the room who paid the score of workers $40 to “protest” the tax. They liked how the testimony was playing—a voice with sincerity and heart, a sad and fearful situation all people would believe. Unfortunately, their workers are being fed the same misinformation the rest of us are.

Enacting the soda tax will help working families, so that our kids have greater opportunities than we had, so that our kids can better compete for better paying jobs, even start their own businesses themselves

Don’t believe the hype. Tune out the fearmongering. Look to the broad coalition of trusted Philadelphia organizations whose work it is to strengthen our communities and make our lives better. Looking for an ally of working families and the poor? Coke isn’t it.

Click here for a list of organizations leading Philadelphians for a Fair Future.

End this crisis! Don’t miss your chance to be included in the biggest education event of the year! On May 2nd, join us at the Rally for Fair Education Funding in Harrisburg. Contact Shirlee to arrange a bus for you or your group. MORE

Parents in Pennsylvania spend nearly as much on daycare as they do on housing — and that’s if they have one child. READ ABOUT IT

Don’t miss the event of the year for champions of children and youth! Special performances, dinner, and, of course, our live auction! RESERVE YOUR TICKETS!

“The ads, sponsored by the American Beverage Association, insist on calling Kenney’s proposal a grocery tax. That’s like calling the cigarette tax a grocery tax because cigarettes are sold in supermarkets and grocery stores.” The Daily News, in their endorsement of the proposed tax on sugary drinks, pointing out the misleading use of the term ‘grocery tax’. READ IT