Sin taxes are bad. Naughty greedy politician, no second yacht for you!

As a pretty big example, everyone agrees cigarettes are bad. A pack costs maybe $1.50 to make, retail is near ten times that though with the difference being all tax - stores don’t make any profit. Along comes electronic cigarettes disrupting that tax cash flow, which is supposed to be there as a deterrent, but instead of embracing a less harmful way to get people off cigarettes they want to make it illegal because they’d lose a steady money stream from smokers. Sin taxes are bad.