Later this month, lawmakers in Pennsylvania could sign off on a budget to expand gambling beyond Pennsylvania’s handful of casinos.

That comes just two years after the state budget included a controversial plan to plug a gaping hole in the Philadelphia School District’s budget with a new tax on cigarettes sold in Pennsylvania’s largest city.

Then, as now, lawmakers were hoping to top up government budgets by cashing in on Pennsylvanians’ addictions — from gambling to tobacco. Light up a cigarette while sitting at a slot machine and downing an alcoholic beverage and you’ll be contributing three-fold to the state’s tops-in-the-nation system of so-called “sin taxes.”

Heavy reliance on those taxes, though, is a suspect strategy at best.

“Sin taxes are regressive, notoriously unreliable, and are often used to prop up unsustainable spending increases,” says Matthew Glans, a senior policy analyst at the Heartland Institute, a free market think tank…. read more at Watchdog.org