NEW YORK – Today is election day in the United States, and some cities will try to make it more expensive for consumers to purchase sugary beverages, reports Bloomberg BNA.

Four cities have ballot initiatives that seek to tax sugary beverages: San Francisco; Oakland and Albany, California; and Boulder, Colorado. “For Bay Area residents, that’s an extra $1.44 for your average 12-pack of soda, pop, soft drink or whatever the local lexicon coins it,” writes the news source.

Campaigns to combat sugary beverages, notes the news source, have brought in nearly $40 million in political spending to the Bay Area, and if successful, the campaign to tax soft drinks could spread to other areas of the United States.

“It can take off very quickly, to the point that it spreads nationally,” Michael Siegel, professor at Boston University’s school of public health, told Bloomberg BNA.

Two cities to date have a soda tax on the books: Philadelphia and Berkeley, California. Siegel told the news source that recent research suggests a consumption tax could discourage consumers from purchasing higher calorie beverages, but these taxes also have a “double whammy” effect of raising revenue for other public health initiatives. He likens the move to sugar-sweetened beverages to the same way states singled out tobacco for additional revenue.

“I think that public health [officials] and policymakers are starting to apply the lessons that we’ve learned from the tobacco movement, to apply those to the issue of obesity and soda consumption,” Siegel told Bloomberg BNA.

Meanwhile, beverage companies have ramped up efforts to combat the tax initiatives on soft drinks.

“We don’t think the goal of beverage taxes is public health. We think they are taxes that unfairly hurt our customers,” Susan Neely, president and CEO of the American Beverage Association (ABA), told Bloomberg BNA, adding that the soft drink industry supports “calories in/calories out” public health initiatives that encourage exercise and limit calorie intake. 

Neely also says that soda taxes are an oversimplification of complex health issues, telling the news source: “I think it’s a false framing to oversimplify a multifactorial problem like obesity and present a tax as a solution. ... First of all, obesity has many causes, and second, taxes have not been proven to change behavior.”