Sin Tax
Sin Taxes ought to be illegal, and more then likely they probably are. I can’t argue one way or the other there though because I’m not sure about the that particular issue, but that isn’t really the point of this article.
Here over the past couple of years, many states have raised the sin tax on alcoholic and tobacco products reasoning that they would be doing everyone a favor by reducing sales of these products and bring more money into local and state coffers. They have succeeded in doing both, they have slightly decreased the sale of these products and have greatly expanded their tax revenues. I just have to question the fact that these two things made us all better off.
Seems to me that taxes are always on the rise and rarely decreasing, so this hasn’t done anything to help us there except allow government to spend more and more. Sales have decreased, but not by much, and I can’t really see how this has made us a better society. I know the original intent to raise the sin tax on tobacco products was to get people to quit using them, however is that really the job of the government, to police our private lives? They couldn’t make tobacco illegal because it wouldn’t be popular and they wouldn’t get all those juicy taxes they are accustomed to, so their solution was to just raise the taxes on something they deemed to be evil.
I’ll keep it short. Times are tough these days, yet all the government seems to care about is getting more and more of our money, which for the most part, is wasted. Seems to me more like taxation without representation.