I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I'm leery of regs and laws designed to change behavior by incentives. A good example of a silly law that ought to be banished is the ACA tax on tanning beds.

Jesus, man. Pigovian taxes, that seek to internalize externalities, should be the least objectionable means of generating revenue.

In theory, this is great. We're all against skin cancer. But these are largely cash businesses. You've just pushed an entire industry into more robust tax evasion (many were already engaged in it, no doubt). Somewhere, a revenue agent is poring over the books of a tanning salon, wasting his time to collect $5,000.00 in taxes on under-reported income and fines when he'd be doing much more for the treasury by chasing foreign bank accounts.

The tobacco version of this is "but smuggling" which similarly is a side issue that's beside the point, especially as you made up the revenue agent that's doing all this work.

And how much easier would land development be if you didn't have five different fed, state, and municipal agencies assessing your project.

Not sure about where you live, but I keep a pretty close eye on development here in Minneapolis and there's no state or federal level review unless there's state or federal land, or large-scale environmental remediation to be done.