Not Exactly Rock 'n' Roll, But Most Assuredly Genocide...

Okay, my pursuit of a 100% vegan life has been often derailed by necessity, the dictates of aesthetics, and lust (sorry, but caviar cannot be scrubbed from one's diet, especially if you're offered the relatively good stuff), but one gun I've assiduously stuck to fires no-cola hollow points. As a Southern waif, I was given Coca-Cola (and occasionally, its sub-variants) as a substitute for water. Questioning its propriety seemed as close to apostasy as a young atheist tended to veer in tiny Adel, so when I jumped the ethical fence after the inaugural OHNE tour in 2002, I donned the tattered robes of the heretic once and for all. I can count the Cokes I've quaffed in the intervening seven years, and most of them were consumed to lessen the effects of particularly dire hangovers. The point is, sugary soft drinks are fucking toxic, and I say tax the shit out of them. Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity has been pondering this very same issue, and they've developed a calculator to help us determine just how much revenue could be generated from taxation of Pemberton's old cocawine.

Using Yale's revenue calculus, my tawdry home state of Georgia, currently governed by oafish Republican turncoat Sonny Purdue and unlikely to ever pass such a tax on their beloved elixir, could generate $745,679,560. In one year...

Hail Toothless Satan,

TS