Cigarette

The rise in cigarette tax for the health of our children.
I’m non-smoker.

Unfortunately, the people who proposed this legislation understand supply and demand about as well as a fish understands trigonometry.

When the cost of cigarettes goes up, people smoke less or quit smoking altogether. Then, the money that was supposed to go to health-care is gone. What do you think will be Congress’s response? Raise taxes on everyone, of course!

This reminds me of another piece of legislation here in Florida. The govt wasn’t making enough money on the toll roads so they decided to raise the price of the tolls. The problem is that now, nobody uses the toll roads because they are too expensive.

When most people stop smoking, how is the non-existent tax money supposed to pay for anything?

This legislation is counter-intuitive and it doesn’t make an ounce of sense.

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The Federal government has been taxing cigarettes at $3.90 a carton for years, so where the h*ll is that money?

Btw, don’t give me that old it is OK to tax cigarettes, this applies to lots of different taxes being raised.

That’s a very hard tax to track down! When SCHIP came up last year, I tried to find out how my state was using the cigarette tax money and <pardon the pun> it’s smoke and mirrors.

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Like the ones about if you smoke you might beat your wife is stupid…I smoke and its annoying to hear "you better quit" all the time from someone who has never picked up a cigarette, much less smoked one.

It gets better, it’s your tax money that’s paying for them.

The UK’s most complained about advert in 2007 was an anti-smoker (whoops, sorry that should be anti-smoking) advert that was paid for out of the NHS budget.

To give you some idea of the scale of the government anti-smoker drive in the UK, their costs were £17.34 million in 2003-4, £24 million in 2004-5 and £22.7 million in 2005-6 (I can’t find figures for any later than that, but the quantity seemed to increase).
Compare that with the cost of the children’s hospital that’s just been built near me (£30 million, of which they had to fund-raise half themselves).

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Does it support medical care, etc?
I could really use some links to websites explaining this, as well as links to sites with some sort of an opinion paper on what we could place this tax on instead, or about how we could eliminate it compleatly if we were to ban smoking nationwide.
I’m doing a persuasive essay for school in which I am persuading the people in my class to support a nationwide smoking ban.
Help is greatly appreciated. =)
I live in Texas…
Hope that helps.

It depends. Taxes on cigarette sales are collected by the federal and state governments and these taxes go into the governments’ general funds. They are used to pay for everything the government spends money on. In recent decades, whenever an increase to the existing taxes on tobacco has been passed, it has always passed under the argument that smoking causes greater health costs, so the "extra" tax money is supposed to be used to fund these costs, plus programs/advertising to encourage/assist quitting.

If you look at it, it is like a Catch 22. They raise taxes on tobacco to cover additional costs that tobacco causes and to try to get people to quit. But if people quit, then tax revenues from tobacco would go down. The government can’t afford to have these tax revenues disappear, so they will need to raise these taxes again to ensure that their tax revenues from tobacco doesn’t go down. In a way, you could say that the last thing the government would want would be for everyone to just quit smoking one day.

Besides, growing tobacco is a huge part of the economy for many southern states. You won’t see a general ban on smoking (or see tobacco being outlawed), because you would go up against not just the tobacco companies and their lobbyists, but the senators and congressmen from these southern states that rely heavily on tobacco as a part of their economy. You wouldn’t want to be the senator that has to go before their constituents and say that the people that voted him into office is now out of work and on unemployment and is now going to lose their homes to foreclosure because he (or she) voted to outlaw tobacco.

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