Soda taxes are meant to discourage people from drinking too much sugar, which is linked to a host of bad health outcomes. Cities that imposed the taxes saw a 33% decrease in the sale of sugary drinks.

Sales of sugary drinks fell dramatically across five U.S. cities, after they implemented taxes targeting those drinks – and those changes were sustained over time. That’s according to a study published Friday in the journal JAMA Health Forum.

Researchers say the findings provide more evidence that these controversial taxes really do work. A claim the beverage industry disputes.

The cities studied were: Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., and Boulder, Colo. Taxes ranged from 1 to 2 cents per ounce. For a 2-liter bottle of soda, that comes out to between 67 cents to $1.30 extra in taxes.

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Kaplan and his colleagues found that, on average, prices for sugar-sweetened drinks went up by 33.1% and purchases went down by basically the same amount – 33%.

  • Duranie@literature.cafe
    1·
    10 months ago

    Not when Cook County did it in Illinois. Zero sugar/artificially sweetened drinks were taxed at the higher rate, yet sugary fruit juices got a pass. I live on the border of Cook and Will county, so I just shopped at grocery stores outside the country. I’m not sure how long it was in effect, but they ended up cancelling it.