It seems to me that certain members of our state's legislature love putting higher tax burdens on small groups of Louisiana residents. In fact, there is a proposal that is allegedly going to be put before the state's governing body in the upcoming session that would bring the tax on cigarettes in Louisiana up to $1.04 per pack.

That means the state is pinning hopes of revenue generation on the backs of 1.02 million Louisiana residents. Over half of those citizens are in the state's lower socio-economic ranking. Let's tax poor people who smoke so they will quit and get healthy!

Real life just called, it doesn't work that way.

If we're going to hose a segment of our state's population let's go after the real addicts. The ones who are willing to pay almost anything to get their fix. That's right I am talking about the fervor and lust for college football in our state.

Hear me out on this one. Let's take the stated capacity for Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, Cajun Field in Lafayette, along with the capacity of the home stadiums for Louisiana Tech, Southern University, Grambling University, McNeese State, and Tulane University.  For the sake of easy reading math, we will round that total to 250,000 people paying for tickets to a college football game.

For the sake of argument let's assume that each of the aforementioned schools has six home football games. That puts our total home football crowds for the season at 1.47 million for the season if all schools played to capacity crowds.

Since we know a lot of teams don't draw a full house let's look at 80% capacity for the season. That's 1.17 million people. What if we levied a college football tax of $2.00 per ticket? That would generate almost $2.5 million dollars that could go for higher education.

Now before you go squawking about another two bucks to see a football game. I know how much college football fans pay when there is a big game on the line. I've seen seats go for over a thousand dollars when it's a really big game. So, keep your whining to yourself there is no crying in revenue generation.

What do you think? It's stupid, right? It's stupid to tax a small segment of the state's population for doing something that is not paramount to living. But wait, we do that already. There is a precedent.

We do it for cigarettes. We do it for booze. Why not college football? That way if you smoked, drank, and attended an LSU game you could just drop your first born off at Governor Edwards house on your way out of town. Your bill would be paid in full.

 

Of course, this isn't a reality. It's not going to happen so loosen that chin strap before you cut off the blood supply to your brain. I just wrote this to illustrate how to think like a legislator. As far as I can see if you want to be good at passing bad laws you just have to come up with most absurd ideas you can think of, propose a tax on them, and then wait for a lobbyist to buy you dinner and some drinks. Hookers optionial.

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