Taxes paying through the nose

The problem with taxes isn't just that we have to pay them, but taxes in general create thousands of pages of laws, amendments and decrees that determine how much we have to pay.

We also like to tax our sins, so to speak. The state of California has decreed that the sin of smoking should cost the sinner 87 cents a pack. That's on top of a federal tax of $1.01. Legislators would like, mightily, to raise that another buck-fifty a pack in hopes of saving sinners from themselves and raising more money. They also cite savings in health care, not to mention longer lives.

We think that the evidence that smoking is harmful to health is very strong, and if Congress members were serious about it, they would just ban smoking altogether. That won't happen soon. Not to mention that the black market in cigarettes would flourish, and the feds and states wouldn't get a dime in taxes. Talk about conflicting goals.

Government likes to tax just about every sin under the sun. For the sin of reading this newspaper, you will be assessed a sales tax. If you drink sugary soft drinks, you pay sales tax, and now some folks at Princeton and Harvard are proposing a one-cent-per-ounce tax on that sin.

The soda tax advocates claim that a 10 percent increase in the cost of sugary drinks would result in a 10 percent decline in usage and a health care savings in the billions.

Why not just cut the subsidy to farmers for producing the corn fructose syrup used to sweeten drinks, instead of giving them tax money to grow the stuff and then taxing its consumption?

Then there are the discrepancies in what is taxed. Ice and soda are subject to California sales tax, but chips aren't. Our favorite, however, is this one, from the Board of Equalization: If you hop down to your favorite convenience story and buy a cold cheese dog, and take it with you, it's considered a grocery item, and you pay no sales tax. However, if you buy one from the rotisserie, it's considered takeout, and you pay sales tax. So what happens if you buy a cold burrito and heat it in the store's microwave? Depends on where the microwave is located. In some cases, the state gets a bite of the burrito; in others, it doesn't.

It's just one more reason why you have to love a full-time Legislature, which has never met a tax it didn't like, even when the laws that govern taxes don't make a lick of sense.