What’s become of me?  There once was a time when I’d have been all over something like this.

A tax on soda was one option considered to help pay for health care reform (the Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that a 3-cent tax on each 12-ounce sugared soda would raise $51.6 billion over a decade), and President Obama told Men’s Health magazine last fall that such a tax is “an idea that we should be exploring. There’s no doubt that our kids drink way too much soda.”

But with all the junk food and U.F.O.’s (unidentifiable food-like objects) out there, why soda? Why a tax? And, most important, would it work?

But before we all jump on the Captain Obvious-sponsored “Soda Isn’t All That Good for You” bandwagon, perhaps we should recognize this solution for what it really is: LAME.

The problem here isn’t the sugary drink itself, but the much wider prevailance of cheap, sweet calories.  Soda is NOT the new tobacco, as the New York Times wondered yesterday, because soda is just one of many forms that cheap calories take. Tobacco, on the other hand, is clearly tobacco, for better or worse.  Period.

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