Tobacco Tax / Cigarette Tax

Oh, those clever cigarette company managers. Yes, we all know cancer sticks are bad for you. But if we wave the civil rights banner long enough, we can hide behind laws and somehow make it legal for people to buy these things. If we pay actors enough money to smoke on screen, we can maybe get kids to try 'em.

And then there's vaping; same product, kinda. Prettier packaging. The industry was almost sued out of existence a few times, but again, cleverly, the geniuses (evil as they are), were able to find ways to link tobacco's existence with...presumably good things. Like public school (or at least what it purports to be). So in Chicago, arguably the poorest public school district in the country, the tobacco taxes support a large portion of the school budgets.

So if you kill tobacco, you kill the AP math budget, the AP computer science budget, and the pregnancy awareness team. What is that tax, you ask? Well, if you pay $8 for a pack of cigarettes, something like $5 of it is tax. And all that, net of "transaction costs to the state" (read: corruption coefficient multiplier) goes to fund schools, more or less. Or at least pay for the janitors' and secretaries' pension funds.