Gambling casinos excel at psychological tricks that make it easy to separate you from your money. Chips, for instance, that might be worth $25 look and feel remarkably like plastic quarters. Losing 100 bucks feels like losing four quarters—until you check your bank account once you’re back home.

Same goes for Gov. Tim Kaine’s proposal to raise the grantor’s tax on real-estate property transactions by 25 cents per $100 of value. Hey, we can all afford to chip in a quarter for better highways, right? Let’s do a little simple math. Say you sell your home for $250,000. The Kaine proposal means you’ll owe the state an extra $625 at closing. Sellers pay the grantor’s tax. That’s real money.

The higher tax won’t help revive a struggling housing market. And it will work against affordable housing. Sure, the seller pays the tax, but in a free market economy, these kinds of known costs have a way of working their way into the selling price before the deal’s struck.

This is no two-bit tax increase.

Gov. Tim Kaine’s tax plan borrows a neat trick from Vegas