The US had no soda taxes in 2013. Now nearly 9 million Americans live with them.

On Monday, Seattle became the eighth US municipality to push back against big soda when its city council voted 7-1 for a 1.75 cent-per-ounce tax on sugary drink distributors.

Before Berkeley, California, passed America’s first soda tax focused on health in 2014, lawmakers in 40 cities and states had tried — and failed — to put their own in place.

Now eight municipalities are dinging consumers who want to buy sugary drinks — and five of them passed soda taxes in the past year alone. Here they are:
Berkeley, California
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
San Francisco, California
Oakland, California
Albany, California
Boulder, Colorado
Cook County, Illinois (the county that includes Chicago)
Seattle, Washington

Altogether, this means nearly 9 million Americans are or will soon be living with soda taxes aimed at reducing consumption. (There were soda taxes prior to 2013 but they were very small and mainly focused on revenue generating, not health. For that reason, public health officials and researchers consider Berkeley the first soda tax in the US.)

This is a major shift from just a few years ago. In a 2012 study, University of Minnesota health policy researcher Sarah Gollust found that only 22 percent of Americans favored a soda tax to curb consumption. Now lawmakers even in very conservative states like West Virginia are considering penny-per-ounce excise taxes in the midst of the nation’s obesity crisis. (Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the only city to consider a tax recently and decide against one.)

Continue to vox.com article: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/6/6/15745908/soda-tax-seattle-philadelphia-sugar-drinks