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Yesterday, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana tabled his 2022/2023 budget in parliament.

If you’re not familiar with the name, Godongwana replaced Tito Mboweni during a cabinet reshuffle in August of last year. This leaves Mboweni with more time for his real passion, cooking awful meals at home.

There are plenty of nitty-gritty details to work through, and for that, you can pop in here (a list of the winners and losers) and here (the budget in a nutshell).

It’s a Thursday, the weekend is night, you’re itching to make some poor life choices, so let us focus on the dreaded ‘sin tax’.

TimesLIVE reports:

…Godongwana is planning to hit those who consume vaping products in the pocket as he traditionally does with smokers.

He was planning to amend tax laws by January 2023 to allow for taxation on vaping as part of the “sin tax revenue stream”.

After public consultation, government proposes to apply a flat rate excise duty rate of at least R2.90/ml to both nicotine and non-nicotine solutions.

“The proposal will be included in the 2022 Taxation Laws Amendment Bill for further consultation before being introduced from January 1 2023.”

In layman’s terms, that means you’re going to pay an extra R1,03 for a box of 20 smokes.

Godongwana also came for the spirits, which will increase in price by R4,83 per 750ml bottle.

Here’s a full breakdown of the various price increases:

Image: Nolo Moima/Sunday Times

Could have been worse.

On the plus side, there was some respite on the price of fuel.

With petrol and diesel prices skyrocketing over the past few months, the National Treasury resolved not to hike the general fuel levy and the Road Accident Fund (RAF) levy for the first time in 31 years.

Yes, let’s not give more money to the RAF because it’s a giant, corrupt, money-gobbling pit.

At present, we pay a general fuel levy of R3,85 per litre of petrol and a RAF levy of R2,18 per litre for both petrol and diesel.

Put the money that you would have spent on those levies towards your bottle of gin. Problem solved.

[source:timeslive]