As I said, I’m not in Seattle, but in my town the tax is added to the soda price. I don’t recall any claims that the consumer wouldn’t pay it.
Do you feel the same way about cigarette taxes?
Yes, and alcohol taxes. I don’t smoke, and think it’s a nasty habit, but I don’t like the government implementing different taxes for different things. They should tax the bare minimum, and not try to engineer behavior. Or, at the very least, taxes should be reasonably similar from place to place, to discourage smuggling and gray markets, which happens with heavily-taxed items.
FWIW, I feel the same way about property taxes. I disagree with the idea that current residents pay a lower tax than neighbors who just moved in, as (I believe) it’s done in CA. If Neighbor A owns a $300k house, he should be paying the same property tax as Neighbor B in a $300k house, no matter how long each has been there.
It’s not quite “social engineering via taxation” when you have this:
In other words, it’s a general fund tax with a do-gooder patina.
Same problem with hefty cigarette taxes where a relative pittance goes to health care to deal with smoking-related disease and/or smoking cessation programs, and most gets plowed into other spending.
Or cameras set up to identify red-light runners. My state recently banned such cameras due to the perception they were a cash cow for municipalities, which weren’t careful about operating them properly so long as the money flowed in. I suspect public resistance would be less if the funds raised from traffic camera fines were devoted to improving traffic safety.