Taxes on the Good Stuff

What is the saying that the “best things in life are free?” Well, depending on who you talk to, not only are they not free, but they are getting more and more expensive by the day. For example, in what can only be considered archaic terms, the idea of “sin taxes” are alive and well and living in Florida. That’s right, the sunny state of Florida says that they are not going to make smoking or gambling illegal – they are just going to tax the heck out of them until you stop.

What is crazy about this is that they want people to gamble – they want them to play the slot machines because they know that people who gamble will be paying their bills. It’s true – if people don’t play the slot machines they won’t get a lot of the money that they are counting on for making their bottom line of their budget.

There is a large amount of money that comes into the state for people who play slot machines and they are hoping for more as they allow the Seminoles to bring thousands of slot machines into the state. However, they are going to tax the heck out of them in order to get every dime that they can – and assumedly keep people from playing them?

After all this was the logic behind the cigarette tax – if they raise the tax on it really high eventually people will stop smoking. However, if people did actually stop smoking they would lose out on that money too. Slot machines are not the real evil here, it is whoever is thinking that they are that needs to take a fresh look at the situation. If they think that they can stop people from gambling because of taxes they could not be more wrong.

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