👉Background: For the uninitiated, vapes are electric cigarette devices that contain vapour, nicotine and some sort of flavouring. And experts do not like them at all - they're often considered a gateway to nicotine addictions.

👉 What happened: In fact, around 1.1 million Australians use vaping products, and this increased significantly over the past few years.

👉 What else: Now, a new analysis has found that licensing vaping products in Australia could help the government raise more than $800m over four years through GST alone. And this could become another sin tax for the government.

What's the key learning?

💡 A sin tax is a tax placed on goods or services that are considered to be harmful to society. Generally this includes tobacco, alcohol, sugary drinks and gambling.

💡On the one hand these taxes make the products less affordable to consumers, but it also means the government makes a whoooole lot more money on these products. And this creates a bit of a contradiction - because the governments can become addicted to these revenues.

💡In fact, the federal government raised $13bn from tobacco excise receipts in the last financial year (or 2.5% of total taxes). But in recent years, as more Australians move over to vaping, the tax take from tobacco has actually declined by billions of dollars.

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