Down and out, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg heads to Mexico


Photo: Meme credit: Jennifer Kerns

Monday, October 14, 2013
by Jennifer Kerns

SACRAMENTO, CA, October 14, 2013 — La Ninera. It’s Spanish for “nanny.” Or, as we here in the States call it: Bloomberg.

Searching for relevance after bruising election losses, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is trying his hand in the country of Mexico.

Last month, left-leaning Slate.com reported that Bloomberg got “completely repudiated across two time zones” after the loss of critical Recall elections in Colorado which left Bloomberg’s “Mayors against Illegal Guns” PAC answering questions of relevance (not to mention left Bloomberg’s personal checkbook nearly a half-million dollars lighter). That same night, Bloomberg’s choice of Christine Quinn as his successor for Mayor of New York also tanked at the ballot box.

With nothing but time on his hands now that his pet projects have fizzled and his term as Mayor is up, Bloomberg finds himself a bit of a bored Manhattan housewife. Desperate to find his next project, he’s headed to Mexico where he plans to push a National soda tax.

I have one word for Bloomberg: cuidado. The soon-to-be-former Mayor is pushing the so-called “fat tax” despite evidence that such taxes just don’t work. In Denmark, the world’s first soda tax was lauded but was repealed just one year later on the grounds it hurt jobs, adversely affected the economy, and most importantly, there was no evidence to suggest it helped make a dent in the obesity problem.

In Bloomberg’s own home state of New York, the legislature rejected his soda tax, and a judge recently struck down the Mayor’s ban on Big Gulps. And in states like California, Bloomberg’s socialist agenda also got shot down, as soda taxes were rejected in the liberal Bay Area town of Richmond, California and in the city of El Monte, just outside of Los Angeles. A Statewide soda tax also failed this year in a California State Senate subcommittee, leaving any prospects for future taxes on sodas just plain flat.

Furthermore, two U.S. States that have soda taxes – Arkansas and West Virginia – continue to rank among the most obese states in the nation.

While the country of Mexico does have the highest per-capita rate of soda drinkers, the reality is that Mexico has much bigger hurdles to overcome: drug use, gangs, corruption, and safe drinking water for children in rural areas – a problem, by the way, which has been latently solved by soft-drink manufacturers, because the conventional wisdom is that compared to water in some areas in Mexico, at least the water in sodas is clean, purified, then bottled.

In an era when most politicians are working hard to import freedom to other countries – such as free elections and free markets – it seems the last thing the world needs is to be told what they can drink and even worse, how much they have to pay for it.

Bloomberg’s New York policies were wrong for California, they were wrong for Colorado, and shoot, they were even wrong for common-sense New Yorkers. What makes Bloomberg think Mexico is any different?

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