We’ve written about these sin taxes of various sorts at length here and studied how well they’ve worked out for others. (Spoiler alert: they don’t.) What Cook County was attempting looked to be fraught with problems from the get-go and now the drama is playing out in a hot mess beyond even what I’d imagined. So poorly thought out was this plan that the county seems to be breaking the law no matter how they try to implement it. (CBS Local)

Does charging someone a tax on something and then immediately turning around and handing them the money back sound a bit warped to you? Same here, but that was only the latest attempted solution at putting this soda tax in place. When it was first moved into action, a judge blocked it for being unequally applied. After some changes managed to sort out that problem, they realized that where and when the tax was applied was also going to be a problem. In June, Reason Magazine saw trouble coming and broken down why the second version wasn’t going to work either.

You can see how they were running out of options. The sugary drinks would still be taxed at the point of sale, so jamming the tax down the throats of the retailers only to have it taxed again at the register was a tax on a tax. That was going to be shut down also. That meant going back to applying the tax to the consumer, but anyone on Food Stamps (SNAP recipients) could not, by law, be taxed for bottled beverages. (That was part of the original problem with the tax being unevenly applied.) So in a desperate, last bid measure to fix the mess they created themselves, they decided to tax the SNAP recipients purchasing soda but then immediately turn around and refund the money to them.

I’ll admit that the feds seems to be taking kind of a hard line here. It’s not as if the SNAP recipients are actually paying the tax, but being charged that fee – even just for a few seconds – is a violation of the law, so now the Department of Agriculture is threatening to cut off all of the county’s SNAP money. It’s a comedy of errors which needs some Benny Hill music in the background.

Unaddressed in this ongoing debate is the flawed nature of the soda tax itself. This was never about making people healthier. If the County Commission honestly believes that soda is bad for people (Mika Brzezinski once declared it to be “poison”) then why not just ban it entirely? Because the tax, like all other sin taxes, is in place to make it look like you are “punishing” people for socially unacceptable behavior while filling up the county coffers with their shopping dollars.

Let’s face it… government at all levels claims that smoking is bad and people shouldn’t smoke. (Hard to argue, but… free choice, personal responsibility and all that.) In response, they tax cigarettes to the point where a less than $3.50 pack of Marlboro smokes (what they actually cost) can run you as much as $15 in New York City. The rest is all taxes. And if everyone in the country suddenly stopped smoking tomorrow a lot of these place would go broke almost immediately.