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Cook County, Illinois lawmakers recently voted to repeal the nation’s largest soda tax only two months after it went live (the repeal scheduled to be effective at the end of Cook County’s fiscal year – November 30, 2017). And this is on the heels of a soda tax defeat in May of this year in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where voters rejected a local soda tax measure by a significant margin.  All of this hostility to the soda tax reached a crescendo in Michigan, where the legislature approved a bill to preemptively ban local governments from levying excise taxes on food, in response to the national trend of taxing sweetened beverages.  Michigan bill H.B. 4999 cleared the Senate on October 12, 2017 with a 30-5 vote, after passing the House on October 5, 2017. Specifically, the bill prevents localities from imposing taxes or fees on the sale, manufacture, or distribution of food, including beverages and chewing gum.