Sin Taxes

27-10-23 00 / episode: 284

Hi and welcome to the Les bears dot com podcast.

This podcast is for extensive English listening.

So every day I'll make a new podcast about a different topic.

That way you can hear lots of different vocabulary and you don't have to listen too long.

Two or three minutes at best.

Hi and welcome to the Les pers dot com podcast.

Today is episode 284.

I want to talk about sin taxes, sin taxes.

Now, I don't mean sin taxes in the word order and how to put words together in this sentence.

I mean, as in the sense of sin and tax, a tax is what you have to pay to the government when money moves or changes hands from one person to another.

Typically the government wants to tax that and they can tax things that we would characteristically in the West call sins.

Some classic sins that you can put a sin tax on would be tobacco, alcohol, pornography.

Those are classic sin taxes when people buy tobacco, especially back home in my, my homeland of Canada, they pay a high tax on the tobacco substantially higher than other products.

Alcohol also has a special tax to the best of my knowledge, gambling can be taxed.

That would be a great syntax.

And I hear of some countries that are opening up gambling casinos but not for their resident nationals.

They're opening up the casinos only for foreign nationals.

People from a different country and they want those people to come gamble, lose their money and along the way, pay tax and perhaps stay in the apartment or hotel and buy food in the restaurant.

Tourism, gambling, tourism, the money, the, the government wins all the way around and they get lots of money from sin taxes.

Some people have a bad feeling about sin taxes.

For instance, uh, if you allow people to buy alcohol and then you tax them on it, you're trying to make money off of people's weaknesses.

That's a good point.

The counterpoint that I heard is, well, if you don't tax it and if you make those things illegal, people are probably gonna try and get it anyway.

And so you're not encouraging them to indulge in their weak point.

You're merely trying to profit from the weak point, which is going to happen anyway.

Kind of like rain, falling out of the sky, it will fall and go to the sea.

Let's catch it on the way and take the energy out in a dam for electricity.

What do you think about sin taxes?