Dear Kansas Senate

Dear Kansas Senate,

It is hard enough out there right now. Really. I got laid off last year, for Christ's sake. My family scrapes by now, choked to the hilt with debt and student loan payments. My retirement funds are just now starting to recover from the recession, my wife is still trying to get through college, and my daughter, poor thing, has to wear used clothes we buy at garage sales.

And now you want to make it harder for me to be fat.

It's not enough that you take away my right to have my car's suspension be destroyed with your constant and diligent road maintenance, not enough that you provide and maintain gorgeous public lands upon which I successfully caught catfish two weekends ago, not enough you forced me to endure top-notch schools...now you want to incentivize healthiness too? You bastards.

This is America! In America we're supposed to be rotund, fat behemoths! We need those sugary, death-hastening, acidic drinks in order to stay awake and work the long, stressful hours required to make enough money to buy all the fast-food we eat! You can't take that away from us!

Everyone knows that when government increased the tax on cigarettes, the number of smokers went down. Increasing the tax more, decreased the number of smokers more. It's science. Same thing is true for alcohol. But I know deep down that that wouldn't apply here!

Look, we know you are arguing that you are doing this to shore up the state deficit. And I know that the deficit was caused by the recession. And I know the recession was mostly not the fault of Kansans. But you're politicians! Don't we pay you to magically fix the budget every year despite changes in the taxes levied? Doesn't part of that assume you will always be able to lower taxes, no matter what the national fiscal situation is?

And just because the $90 million dollars you would raise from the soda tax would save thousands of government jobs, keep many schools open, and help Kansans statewide, what's more important than any of that crap is saving the jobs of the three to five hundred Coke and Pepsi employees who would be laid off as a result of this tax! You just can't do that to good people. To hell with the hundreds of teachers that would be laid off, the hundreds of road workers that would be laid off, and the multitude of others that would be laid off as a result of a state deficit.

Look, if you want to tax something, tax lipstick. You could make a lot of tax revenue because lots of people use it. But, since I don't personally use it, I don't really care much if you tax it.


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