Desperate States: Pornography, Strippers, Escorts, Drugs Its All Good Now

In tough fiscal times, everything needs to be monetized. Including morality.

And governors and legislators in many cash-strapped states have decided that vice can be lucrative, in the form of sin taxes.

Texas, Georgia and Pennsylvania have considered “pole taxes” — for buyers of pornography and patrons of strip clubs and escort services.

Seven states last year either enacted new taxes on alcohol or raised old ones, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Since January 2009, 22 states have increased their tobacco taxes, and now South Carolina, which has held its cigarette tax at 7 cents a pack for more than three decades, may follow. In Nevada, the State Senate has discussed expanding, and taxing, legalized prostitution. Proposals for soda and candy taxes are also percolating in places like New York, Colorado and Washington State.

In California, advocates of marijuana legalization are pointing to the tax revenue that will be generated.

And 25 states have expanded or considered expanding their sanctioned gambling operations.

“The honest way to raise more revenue would be to raise income tax rates,” said Peter L. Faber, a tax lawyer and partner at McDermott Will & Emery in New York. “But it is more politically attractive to tax these kinds of things. No one can get mad at you for taxing people who drink too much,” meaning tipplers are fair game.

Cloaking taxes in moral terms is not new. Advocates for ending Prohibition during the depths of the Great Depression argued that the “noble experiment” hadn’t reduced drinking, while desperate social conditions had grown worse. Prohibition, they argued, encouraged cooperation with organized crime and contempt for the law.
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