A damn dirty tax and spend liberal complains about a TAX?!?!?!

Perusing an old article on Cincinnati.com this portion of the article really stuck out to me:

"A top Hamilton County official has proposed an array of tax increases – for property owners, shoppers, or smokers, among others – to make up for a hole in the fund that paid for construction of the Bengals’ and Reds’ stadiums."

Now to be fair before I begin this rant... I am a smoker.  I've been a smoker for over 20 years now.  I know it's bad for me, I know it's expensive, I know it smells... save your non-smoker cliche's cuz I've heard them and if my mom, wife, and 6 year old daughter haven't talked me into quitting, there's no way you've got a shot.

What bothers me here, and bothers me about sin taxes in general is not the THOUGHT behind them, but rather the application of said taxes.

See, if you keep raising the prices of cigarettes, eventually people will quit.

That's fine, that's GREAT, I'm all for it... but see you're not raising cigarette taxes to pay for something like healthcare, which costs more because I smoke.  You're raising them to pay for a stadium, or a road, or more police officers.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for stadiums, roads, and cops... but if I quit smoking, you've lost that tax revenue I was contributing to pay for those things, so where does this revenue come from?  Suddenly you've got the same hole in the budget to fill because you went with the easy solution of picking on those filthy smokers again. 

We're an easy group to pick on.  We know what we're doing grosses most people out and in my personal experience we're some of the most deferential people in society.  For the most part we don't complain that we have to go outside to smoke, we'll avoid large crowds of people, the elderly and children.  We begrudgingly accept not smoking in restaurants after meals any longer (even though a smoke after a meal is one of the best 20 cigarettes of the day).  Heck you guys don't even want smoking in bars any more, fine.

We've reached a point, however, where the sin tax on tobacco has reached it's peak.  It's come to the point where those who are going to quit because of pricing us out of the market is finally really kicking in, or you're driving us across the river and losing every single bit of new and old tax to Kentucky.  So let's think about the problem, come up with a reasonable long term solution to pay for your projects and leave raising the sin taxes to programs that they actually apply to.

mmkay?