I somewhat agree. I think that all that might happen is that the headline would change to something along the lines of "10% of households pay 50% of taxes on a

I somewhat agree. I think that all that might happen is that the headline would change to something along the lines of "10% of households pay 50% of taxes on alcohol and cigarettes". I think it's easy to look at these things, see how they disproportionately affect the poor, and try and draw a causative relation based on that. I get it, I'm guilty of it, but I think a lot of these problems are substantially deeper than that. I think the more important question is "why are these 10% so dependent on alcohol and cigarettes? what about the way we structure society leads to this behavior?" and I think focusing on the "sin tax" part of it really misses the mark. Eliminating sin taxes would be, at most, a band-aid patch, not a "solution".