All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

It's the most explosive moment for the soda industry since the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment.

Some leading health experts are calling for a sin tax on the surgary beverages Americans drink, like it's going out of style.

They say that a tax of one cent per ounce on soft drinks sweetened with sugar could be a major source of revenue for health care reform - pulling in nearly 15 billion dollars a year.

It may also be a way to combat obesity. UCLA researchers found that people who drink soda are 27 times more likely to be overweight. A regular, daily soda drinker can consume - get this - 39 pounds of sugar a year just from those drinks. Gulp!

President Obama thinks the tax is an idea worth exploring, and some lawmakers say taxes on cigarettes have reduced smoking and raised revenues.

Without a doubt, the idea is bubbling up in Washington and it could soon give soda companies some major gas pains.

That's a page from my notebook.

I'm Katie Couric, CBS News.

[Editor's note: Tonight, we're beginning series of in-depth stories that we'll be airing about twice a week until Election Day. Each will focus on one major issue that affects Americans – from health care to the environment to education. It's called "Where They Stand," and is designed to help see straight through the rhetoric and find out what impact each candidate's plan would actually have on you. Tonight, Anthony Mason has our first installment, and it's about something that hits every American's wallet … and on which Obama and McCain differ significantly: taxes. Correspondent Anthony Mason contributed this post about his report for tonight's Evening News.]

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We headed to Ohio, a critical battleground state, to look at the tax issue. Polls show the race there is in a statistical dead heat.

We spent three days there, driving from Columbus to Dayton to Cincinnati – all to spend time with three different families. Their incomes ranged from $32,000 to $213,000. We found them with a little help from the Ohio Society of CPAs, so we could see how the candidate’s tax proposals could affect a cross section of Americans.

Kendra Foos, a mother of three in Miamisburg, Ohio, summed up what a lot of middle income taxpayers seem to be feeling: “We’re on our own. That’s how I feel. There isn’t anybody that’s rooting for us...

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The government is sending out tax rebate checks, and if you haven't gotten yours yet, you soon will.

The White House hopes Americans will use the money—averaging $600 per person—to make purchases and jumpstart the sputtering economy. But will high gas prices end up guzzling a lot of those dollars?

Just click on the video monitor for the rest of my notebook.

Mark Knoller is a White House Correspondent for CBS News.

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On this final tax filing day of George Bush’s presidency, his campaign promise to fix the “complicated mess” that is the U.S. Tax Code remains unfulfilled.

In 2004, he ran for re-election asserting that the American people deserve – and the U.S. economy demands – “a simpler, fairer, pro-growth system.”

He used his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that year to decry the tax code as “a complicated mess, filled with special interest loopholes, saddling our people with more than six billion hours of paperwork and headache every year.”

He promised that in his second term, he would “lead a bipartisan effort to reform and simplify the federal tax code.”

A couple of weeks before his Inauguration, he established a Presidential panel to advise him on ways to reform the tax code. It reported its recommendations on Nov. 1, 2005. But its ideas have been gathering dust ever since.

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April 30th is "Tax Freedom Day" -- but a non-profit tax group says that unless we have some tax reform, and soon, that day could slip later and later in the calendar.

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Mark Knoller is a White House Correspondent for CBS News.

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All through his campaign for re-election, President Bush repeatedly promised that if given a second term, he’d lead the fight to “reform” the tax code.

“Another draw on our economy is the current tax code,” he told the Republican National Convention in accepting it’s re-nomination on September 2, 2004.

He called the tax code “a complicated mess, filled with special interest loopholes, saddling our people with more than six billion hours of paperwork and headache every year.”

“He said the American people deserve – and the U.S. economy demands – “a simpler, fairer, pro-growth system.”

Well, if you just finished filing your federal income tax return, you know that simple and fair are about the last words you might use to describe the tax code – especially if you were hit by the Alternative Minimum Tax and you’re no millionaire...

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