Is it time for a soda tax?

• Author: Friedman, Roberta
• Position: Debate

A nationwide obesity epidemic has led several states and dozens of cities--including New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia--to consider taxes on sugary drinks like soda. Nearly all these proposals have failed. But in November 2014, Berkeley, California, became the first American city to pass a soda tax. A few months later, the Navajo Nation--a 27,000-square-mile Indian reservation in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico that's home to 250,000 people--did the same. Public health groups are hoping to put similar proposals on ballots in about a dozen states in the 2016 election.

YES Almost a third of American adults are obese, and close to 28 million Americans have type 2 diabetes, which can lead to blindness and amputations. Diabetes and obesity are serious medical problems in the U.S., and they have multiple causes. But one pops up repeatedly: too many sugary drinks.

If people drank a soda (or another sugary beverage such as a sports drink, sweet tea, fruit drink, or energy drink) just once in a while, that wouldn't cause a major health problem.

It would, however, be a big problem for makers of sugary drinks. The beverage Industry wants to make sure you keep drinking lots of soda, so It spends about $850 million a year on advertising (much of It targeted at teens) that tells you to "open happiness" and "live for now" with soda. What the beverage companies don't say Is that every time you drink a can of soda, you're consuming 10 teaspoons of added sugar, which research clearly shows is harmful to your health. Regular consumption of that much added sugar Is a recipe for an unhealthy future full of big medical bills.

When something costs more, people buy less of It. Imposing a tax on sugary drinks like soda would, most Importantly, reduce the amount of soda Americans drink. When Mexico imposed a soda tax, people bought less soda. We've already seen taxes work with the tobacco industry: As states raised taxes on cigarettes, smoking rates fell.

But beyond that, a soda tax would also raise revenue to pay for public health programs to prevent the chronic diseases made worse by sugary drinks. Why shouldn't the beverage industry help pay for the expensive problems its products contribute to?

It's important that we educate the public about the dangers of consuming too many sugary drinks. But we know that education by itself is usually not enough to change behavior. When we combine education about the risks with a tax that makes soda more expensive, we...