While the residents of Washington, DC have been taking note of the emergence of vaping for a while, somehow the politicians in charge of the city have mostly neglected the topic. Remember when the Washington Post published basically identical posts about vaping in various public places in DC over the course of like one year? Yeah, I wouldn’t expect you to, but I promise you this actually happened. Well, apparently all the talk about vaping in DC has finally reached city officials; in the city’s new proposed budget, one of the newly introduced taxes would target “vapor products.”

Presumably partly in order to compensate for a 2.3% decrease in cigarette tax revenue from 2013 to 2014, over the course of the next year the District of Columbia plans to instate a tax on vapor products. By taxing electronic cigarettes at the same rate as tobacco cigarettes – calculated presumably as a percentage of sales price, though it’s totally unclear what would count as “vapor products” – the city plans to bring in some $382,000 in 2016, with electronic cigarette tax revenue rising to $659,000 by 2019.

Basically, this means that while the current tax on e-cigs in DC is 5.75%, the acceptance of this budget would double it to 12%. That’s not totally egregious, but it’s not totally fun either. Ultimately, it’s just a way for the city government of DC to suck some more money out of taxpayers who have basically no way to get around it. That makes it less terrible than laws and taxes motivated by a desire to squash vaping out of existence, but it also makes it kind of frustrating. Take a look at the budget if you have a little bit of time and absolutely nothing better to do in the world.

Weirdly, a look at the table of projected revenue values for future years shows that DC is planning on cigarette tax revenues to decline by 0.7% in every year from 2015 to 2019. Given the 2014 decline rate of 2.3%, I can’t pretend to understand these projections at all, except as a way of inflating projected future revenues in a pretty deceitful way. But perhaps that’s exactly what is going to happen once vaping becomes so expensive that it no longer is financially preferable to smoking, and the FDA’s proposed deeming rule takes hold.

The one consolation here is that you can probably still order all of your vaping stuff online and avoid the whole ordeal, but don’t take my word on that one.

Happy vaping!