In other words, your taxes. No matter what they tell you, politicians do not view taxes as a matter of obligation. They do not view them as a matter of fairness. To a pol, taxes are the revenue they need to establish programs and entitlements to assist them in winning their next bid for office. Their concept of taxation is to extract the most revenue with the least amount of pain and whining.
Taxes come in all shapes and sizes.
It also only happens once in your life. You don't even know how much you pay you in hidden taxes as they are just factored into the selling price of these items. While these types of taxes generate quite a bit of revenue for our government, there is not enough money to establish the pork programs for each of our 537 elected officials. To raise this type of booty, they needed something more clever, something more sinister. Something that is so inherently immoral and deceitful, yet so decidedly brilliant that the citizens will have no idea what hit them.