I ain't payin' $5 tax on a keg of Natty Light!

If our legislators weren't so addicted to spending money, our taxes would be a heck of a lot lower.

Vice (or sin) taxes are super-popular, as it's easier to inveigle the control freak nature of some of these pols. Take away the vice, and you take away the easy, interest-free and hassle money to be spent on more noble things, like naming a park after your girlfriend or researching the mating habits of albino squirrels.

We are non-smokers, and we think the habit of smoking is disgusting and dangerous. We will not chase you down with a high-powered fan if we catch you with a cigarette/cigar/pipe, however, as we love and adore freedom and respect personal choice. If the Commonwealth of Massachusetts banned cigarette smoking and cigarette sales, they'd lose $1.50 per pack in tax alone (which comes to $30 per carton - for a $48 carton that comes to a tax rate of 62.5%!). Whether there would be a black market for smokers, or better yet, a gigantic boom for stores in other states with minimal to low taxes (New Hampshire), is uncertain. When Massachusetts loses hundreds of millions of dollars in cigarette taxes because they thought it wise to ban it, everyone loses. Prohibition didn't work because a nice new black market took its place, and crime syndicates loved the idea of cornering the market in illicit hooch.

The 5% booze tax proposal will do nothing to control drinking, i.e. overconsumption of alcohol. The idea of using the money for substance abuse is well and good, but doing it through the focus of a vice tax smacks of the same Carrie Nation prudishness that did very little than give rise to speakeasies and Al Capone. Better yet, why not have some of these politicians, who get paid in the low six figure range, or about ten times poverty level, voluntarily withhold a healthy part of their paychecks for this plan? Nope...they're elected officials, and the little people must pay.