Mayor Bloomberg supported his health commissioner’s call for a tax on non-diet sodas yesterday, and said Gov. Paterson “walked away from” his plan to implement the tax.
“It’s our obligation to tell people what public health problems there are and how to solve it,” Bloomberg said when asked about city Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden’s article in the New England Journal of Medicine advocating a soda tax.
“All the studies show that young kids drink an enormous amount of soda, and if they drink the sodas with all the sugar in it, it adds a great deal of weight to them,” he said.
Still, the mayor said, the city has no immediate plans to push a soda tax — an idea Paterson came up with but dropped amid opposition earlier this year.
“A tax on it, I thought the governor was right on it. He walked away from it,” Bloomberg said.
In the article, Frieden said a tax on sugary drinks could reduce consumption by 10 percent.