Take up smoking! And help children!

Yes, you read the title right.  Recently the US federal government raised the tax on cigarettes by $0.62.  The proceeds would go to funding childrens health care...so improving the health of one by harming the other? Read more here.There could be a lot of aruguments back and forth on why this is good or bad..but my question is - arent we betting those kid's health against someone's poor decision?

This tactic of tapping taxes from consumption of goods that breed "moral low ground" has been around for ages. It has been lovingly called the "sin tax". Link to history of it here. 

So is it ok to sin as long as you pay a tax on it? (pun intended). Plus, who has the moral authority to call out sins of various human beings?  Since smoking has been demonized (for all the right reasons) in modern society, it is easy to get away by raising taxes on some tobacco rolled up in a paper with a filter attached to it. The same may not apply to other "sins" that are not as infamous. It has been proven that sin taxes do work. Take a look at the "Economics of Sin Taxes". Under the guise of "encouraging those bad people to give up their bad habits", we as a society stand to gain from it's proceeds, which can then be applied to the betterment of all - especially the "good" people.

To apply an analogy, we are like the employees of a store that sits across the local whorehouse - 

as long as we dont visit the prostitutes and the prostitutes keep having customers, we ccan keep our morality and eat it too.

P.S - In interest of full disclosure, let me mention for the record that I am not a smoker and that I have never taken up smoking as a habit in my life. So if you were thinking - "he must be smoker; hence the anger" - ha!