'Sin tax' misses the biggies

Gov. Easley is calling for an increase in the "sin tax" -- the common term for taxes levied on items viewed as personal vices.

When I first ran across that term, I wasn't sure what it meant but was very curious about how it would be enforced. Surely sins were committed not just in our deeds but in our thoughts, in our attitudes toward others, in our insistence on personal comfort rather than the common good.

How can you tax hatred or greed or jealousy or laziness? Wouldn't you need to tax good actions left undone as well as the evil actions we take? And who gets to decide what a sin is, anyway?

It was almost a letdown to find out that a "sin tax" was nothing more than a few pennies added to the cost of a pack of cigarettes or bottle of booze. What a cheapening of the word "sin"!

These days, the common view of sin is remarkably physical in nature: It is whatever offends our sense of propriety or damages our health. So we focus on personal vices like smoking and drinking, or on variations from the sexual norm. There's much less attention paid to the ways in which we, individually and collectively, degrade other people, destroy the earth and turn away from the suffering of others.

But it's easy to collect a tax at the grocery store check-out line. It's impossible to levy a tax every time you change the channel because you can't stand to see another report about the thousands who died in China or Myanmar. But which do you really think pains God more, your neighbor's beer or your callousness?