'SIN TAXES' JUST ANOTHER MONEY GRAB.

Byline: CHRIS WEINKOPF

IMAGINE if some Republican legislators decided to use the state tax code to wage war on the vices they find most dangerous and distasteful.

They could start with a $10 surcharge on body piercing - an effective way to scale back the nasty practice while also raising money for reconstructive surgery for the indigent.

Next, they could impose a 50-cent surcharge every time someone rents a pornographic video. The levy might wreak havoc on the San Fernando Valley's economy, but it could also fund treatment for venereal diseases.

In the interest of fairness, the taxing crusaders would also have to hit the soft-porn industry - Hollywood - with a skin-and-cuss tax. For every instance of a four-letter word, deed or body part in a major film, studios would have to pay a flat $1,000 fee. The proceeds, which would easily run into the millions, would then be spent on an advertising campaign put together by some newly minted state bureaucracy, say, the Department of Genuinely Orderly and Ordinary Development (DoGOOD).

Of course, none of this could never happen - that would be ``legislating morality.'' Democrats would burst into fits of apoplexy. The legal system would grind to a halt under the immediate onslaught of ACLU lawsuits.

Yet ``sin taxes'' are a staple of California politics, and a favorite of Sacramento Democrats, who have their own moral code and a unique sense of which ``sins'' most deserve pecuniary punishment. It's not the Ten Commandments they're out to enforce, but the food pyramid. Health is their morality, and they'll tax whatever they must to keep average Californians from getting too fat, wheezy or happy.

Just last week, Democrats on the state Senate's Health and Human Services Committee outvoted Republicans 8-3 in favor of a California soda tax that would add two cents to the cost of every 12 ounces of sugary pop sold in the Sunshine State. If enacted into law, the tax would generate some $342 million in direct revenues for Sacramento, plus an additional $27 million in increased sales-tax receipts as a result of higher prices.

The legislators, who include L.A.-area Sens. Sheila Kuehl, Gloria Romero, Edward Vincent and Majority Leader Richard Polanco, expressed concern that bubbly beverages are turning the state's kids into sedentary chunkers. Their response is to make all nondiet soda drinkers - young and old, fat and thin - pay more, then direct a portion of the proceeds to educate the state on the crisis of corpulence.

Now obesity is, to be sure, a bona fide problem. The surgeon general estimates that 300,000 Americans die each year from fat-related causes, and the National Institutes of Health says one in five kids is overweight. Still, diet clearly would seem a matter best left up to individual choice, not legislative micromanagement. And parents, not politicians, should be the ultimate arbiters of what their children eat and drink.

Not every ``crisis'' cries out for a tax hike.

But the Democratic diet police don't much care for parental rights or individual discretion. For them, the soda tax is a good way to demonstrate their concern, while patching up the $15 billion hole they've made in the state budget.

Where it all ends, no one knows. Sen. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, who authored the soda tax, admits that soft drinks are only one of many factors contributing to the girth of California's youth. There are lots of other culprits, from fast food to Scooter Pies to MTV and Nintendo. In time, Ortiz and her colleagues will have to tax, regulate and exorcise each of these demons, too.

If they can, they will. Before fatty foods, there was alcohol, gambling and tobacco. There's always another vice around the corner, just waiting for a duty of its own.

The sin tax is an especially effective way to ratchet up the state's takings because it's based on divide-and-conquer politics. Politicians identify some peccadillo that's fallen from political fashion, then convince the majority of voters that they're justified in fining their ``sinful'' neighbors for their bad habits. It's far easier to raise taxes on an unpopular minority than on the public at large.

In addition to her war on root beer and cola, Ortiz is sponsoring legislation to raise the state's taxes on cigarettes by 65 cents, bringing Sacramento's haul up to $1.52 per pack. Her colleague, Assemblywoman Wilma Chan, D-Oakland, has proposed legislation that would study the possibility of taxing all kinds of junk food to pay for pediatric dental and health care. Sen. Don Perata, D-Oakland, wants to target law-abiding gun owners with a tax on bullet sales.

The left-wing politician's search for more power and revenue is as shameless as it is boundless.

Some might even call it sinful.