Politicians are truly amazing. When they need money, they are never short of ideas of things to tax. New Jersey is proposing to now tax water from the tap. The proposal is being submitted by State Senator Bob Smith D-Middlesex. Of course, Smith is trying to say it’s not actually a tax and calling it a“user fee” even though you already get a water bill. A “user fee” would be a flat rate. He wants 10 cents per 1,000 gallons so it functions more like a tax than a one-time fee like getting a driver’s license. Smith obtained his J.D. in 1981 from the Seton Hall University School of Law. The only thing law teaches you is how to call a pig a cow and get away with it. It is probably inevitable that they will figure out a way to tax the air for making it clean.
They have in a way managed to tax sex as well over the centuries. In Nevada, they have proposed a $5 tax every time a prostitute performs a service. This is nothing new. The Roman Emperor Caligula (37-41AD) inaugurated a tax upon prostitutes per client (the vectigal ex capturis). There was the bachelor tax which was a punitive tax imposed on unmarried men. The Lex Papia Poppaea was introduced in 9 AD by emperor Augustus (27BC-14AD) to encourage marriage. Penalties were therefore imposed on those who were celibate, with an exception granted to Vestal Virgins. (Ulp. Frag. xvii.1). The law also imposed penalties on married persons who had no children from the age of twenty-five to sixty in a man. Women were taxed who had no children from the age of twenty to fifty (Gaius, ii.111) (Tacit. Ann. xv.19). As strange as that may sound, New Jersey and Michigan proposed a tax on bachelor men to change their behavior.
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