As our readers may have seen in a Baltimore Sun article this morning, Baltimore City Council members will hold a hearing today on the proposed increase of the bottle tax on soft drinks – a 150 percent tax increase.  It is a proposal that will further hurt Baltimore City’s retailers and soft drink manufacturers – and place an additional burden on hard-working families still caught in a difficult economy. And, unfortunately, this is not the first time Baltimore taxpayers are going through this - a similar tax was previously put into place temporarily before it was repealed, because people spoke out so strongly against it.

This is a regressive proposal that will have a big impact on middle- and lower-income residents.  As Americans for Tax Reform stated yesterday: “The tax code should not be used to pick winners and losers.”