This is not a pro-smoking rant...

[muckefuck]

...this is an anti-government rant.

A few years ago, the county tax on cigarettes was 18 cents per pack. In 2004, the county board raised it to $1. As of St. David's Day, it will double to $2 a pack. Add that to the federal, state, and local taxes and you get a whopping $4.05/pack, the highest in the USA. Now, I don't buy cigarettes, so why should I care? Because this is immoral.

Why? Let me count the reasons:

1. It's highly regressive. Really, any flat tax is. It's easy to see how--just do the math: A pack-a-day smoker who was paying $1113.25/year in cigarette taxes (or more than I pay in property taxes on a one-bedroom in a hot neighbourhood) will now pay a staggering $1478.25/year. That's less than 1.5% of her annual income--if she makes more than $100,000/year. Someone making $20,000 will kiss goodbye to 7.4% of their earnings--and that's not even counting the price of the cigarettes! Now, which income bracket do you suppose more smokers fall into?
   
   (And it's worse than that really, since the richer you are, the more purchasing options are available to you. Lower-income smokers already pay more on average because of the markups at inner-city shops, whereas it's much easier for a richer person to order over the Internet or drive to Indiana for their smokes.)
2. It preys on the weak. Yeah, I know, smoking's a choice--that's what people say who have never tried to quit smoking. You know what else is a choice? Drinking milk. How easily could you eliminate all dairy products from your diet if the price of a gallon of milk suddenly doubled? ("But milk is a necessity." Oh yeah? Tell it to the Chinese.) Now run that scenario again, only this time imagine that lactose is the most physically addictive substance known. Smokers already pay a high price for their addiction in the form of societal discrimination and increased health costs. Does it make us feel good to know that we're making their lives even crappier?
3. It's discriminatory. Yes, smoking is a filthy, nasty, dangerous habit. (So's drinking. Guess which kills more innocent bystanders each year?) So are a lot of activities which are pleasurable to those who engage in them. Let me tell you exactly how comfortable I feel with a bunch of grandstanding politicians invoking Puritan sensibilities to divide behaviours into "virtues" and "vices" so they can justify taxing the hell out of the latter: It's a toss-up between "bugger-all" and "f&ck all y'all". Sure, there's an argument to be made that the state has a role in reducing the impact of harmful activities and tax incentives are a less dirigiste method of doing this than outright bans, but it kind of falls apart when certain activities are singled out for exorbitant levies and others get off scot free or nearly so.
   
   (Those of you in the audience who call yourselves Good Liberals can add in the fact that rates of smoking are higher among racial and ethnic minorities than among the general population. That is, the Vietnamese immigrant waitresses on Kenmore are paying more in taxes so the wealthy white males in Margate Park can pay less. Don't we all feel better just knowing that?)
4. It puts the state at odds with its public health mission. Okay, so say we accept that it's the state's role to protect us from ourselves by curbing harmful activities that we engage in willingly. If that's what we want it to do, where's the logic of making it dependent on those self-same activities for a significant portion of its revenue? Every smoker who kicks the habit means less money for the City, the County, and the State. How hard to you think their administrations going to urge the public health authorities under their control to reduce the number of smokers? Would you hire Keebler's PR firm to promote the Atkins diet?
5. It's pussilanimous. This is probably my biggest problem with the tax hike: It's a way of avoiding real budget reform. Everything about it smacks of desperate, short-term, ad hoc thinking. The fundamental problem is that the state spends more money than it takes in. The politicians are too cowardly do what it takes to rectify this, such as making deep cuts in expenditures, tackling corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, and taking on the vested interests who oppose a more equitable tax regime.
   
   Smokers are a socially marginalised group without much clout or public support, so politicians feel free to stick it to them with impunity. Isn't that the kind of injustice government--if it has any justification at all--exists supposed to prevent rather than facilitate?

One of the main reasons the state is becoming increasingly reliant on sin taxes is that one of the best-connected interest groups are the property owners. The County can get away with a lot as long as it doesn't raise taxes on real estate. I recognise that my property taxes are probably lower than they need to be to support the level of public services that I expect, but I'm not exactly going to take to the streets asking for the county to tax me more--and I'm certainly not going to do it as long as much of my tax dollar is frittered away on graft, patronage, and subsidies. Still, if there were someone out there who was actually interested in reforming the tax regime to make it more comprehendable, equitable, and rational instead of just shifting the burden from one lobby to another, I would support them to the fullest--even if the end result was having to pay more. So where do we find this Solon?

Comments

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

Brilliant! Can I reprint this in readers_list (credited to you, with comments turned off, and with a link to your post)?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Wow, you must read fast!

Knock yourself out. I'm sure someone else must've written a better piece with more facts and figures, though, seeing as I couldn't be arsed to hunt down statistics on the percentage of the County budget supported by sin taxes, relative rates of smoking by income and race, or suchlike.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

4. It puts the state at odds with its public health mission. Okay, so say we accept that it's the state's role to protect us from ourselves by curbing harmful activities that we engage in willingly. If that's what we want it to do, where's the logic of making it dependent on those self-same activities for a significant portion of its revenue? Every smoker who kicks the habit means less money for the City, the County, and the State. How hard to you think their administrations going to urge the public health authorities under their control to reduce the number of smokers? Would you hire Keebler's PR firm to promote the Atkins diet?

Actually, I think that making the funding depend on taxes from a habit they're trying to force out is brilliant (assuming cigarette taxes aren't the _sole_ financial backer of the entire public health system). Smokers' problems are a large drain on the public health system, what with emphysema and cancers and reduced disease resistance and generally poorer health, so by eliminating the need for treatment, you also eliminate the source of funding as gradually as you eliminate the need for it.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

(ack - too many edits to the last sentence, and it was left messy...you know what I mean, I'm sure.)

[the-xtina.livejournal.com]

We have public health?

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Which would make a certain kind of sense if "sin" taxes were being used exclusively to finance the social costs incurred as a result of those activities. Unfortunately, many states have begun to use them as a means of balancing their general-fund budgets, while simultaneously paring already inadequate public health systems to the bone.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

If that's the idea, then, like kightp, I'd like to see some kind of direct link: Get a reliable estimate of the increased public health costs due to smoking (good luck with that, btw) and use that as a basis for figuring the total amount of revenue which needs to be raised from cigarette taxes. There's no reason to suspect that the County Board worked that way, however, and every indiciation that this was a quick-and-dirty way to plug an $80 million-dollar budget hole.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Smokers' problems are a large drain on the public health system,

According to a 1997 article in the New England Journal of Medicine (abstract here) that's only true in the short term. In the long term, nonsmokers wind up generating greater health care costs by living longer. (In any given age range, smokers cost more individually, but they tend to remove themselves disproportionately from the older, more expensive age ranges.):

In our study, lifetime costs for smokers can be calculated as $72,700 among men and $94,700 among women, and lifetime costs among nonsmokers can be calculated as $83,400 and $111,000, respectively. This amounts to lifetime costs for nonsmokers that are higher by 15 percent among men and 18 percent among women.

Maybe it's we nonsmokers who should be paying more into the system?

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Uh .... smoking IS a choice. It is difficult to stop, I know because I've done it, and yes it is harder than anything else I've quit. But lots and lots of lots of people have done it. The comparison with milk is bizarre. Compare it with caffeine or alcohol or meth, that would make more sense.

As for the "smokers are a socially marginalised group" group argument ... no, cause they can quit. In fact to STAY smokers they have to exert effort and spend money, so I would make an argument that they are getting what they want in terms of social opprobium and why are they complaining? If I suddenly started smearing myself in rancid herring oil just cause I liked it, how much sympathy wold you have when I complained about being marginalised?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's hard to get someone who hasn't had to kick an addiction an idea of what it's like. Since I don't have a lot of former meth addicts on my Friends list, the best I can do to get them to appreciate what a life change is involved is to pick something that's so integrated into their daily routine that they can't imagine doing without it. If you don't like milk, what about gluten? Or having to give up pants?

Christians can quit being Christians if they want. In fact, they have to exert effort and spend money to STAY Christians. So they shouldn't complain if people marginalise them for their choice, should they?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Sorry if that last response was too snarky. Let's try again:

If I suddenly started smearing myself in rancid herring oil just cause I liked it, how much sympathy wold you have when I complained about being marginalised?

Not much, but that's not really the point. The question is would your marginalisation and my disgust justify hiking up the excise tax on herring oil to astronomical levels (i.e. 50+% of the purchase price) as a consequence?

[that-dang-otter.livejournal.com]

#4 is more or less explicitly true... I recall a French government official saying (in effect) "we have to pay the health costs tomorrow, but we get the taxes today!" Wish I could remember the source...

I would never underestimate the venality of the tax collectors. If there were a tax on strangling babies, they'd be all for it.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

And yet they won't sell and tax heroin. Go figure.

[gopower.livejournal.com]

For the record, all five Republican commisioners voted against the cigarette tax (so did Forest Claypool, one Democrat I'd actually consider voting for if he manages to beat Stroger in the primary).

And I'd add one more argument against it: lack of transparency. While the country will soon be responsible for nearly 50% of the cigarette tax, the city, state and federal government get a slice too (and if I'm not mistaken so do some of these odd governmental entities like the RTA and MWRD). The average cigarette buyer is more likey to blame the retailer for high cigarette prices than County President John Stroger or Mayor Daley or Governor Blagojovich. And that's just the way the pols like it.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I was going to say that that doesn't fit with the list, but not only can I see the argument that transparency is a moral imperative for politicians, I'm actually in favour of it.

A non-moral argument I left off the list is decreasing returns. Hasn't anything from the past 50 years of economic research trickled down into the brains of the people responsible for our public finances?

[bsquad.livejournal.com]

Well thought-out rant, but I question one of your facts. Cigarettes in New York City are currently selling for more than ten dollars a pack, of which I believe nearly seven dollars are city, state, and local taxes.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

*sputter*

I'm going by what the local media have been saying, e.g.: "With the hike, Chicago will have the highest cigarette taxes in the nation."--Chicago Sun-Times.

According to the NYC website: "There is a combined City and State cigarette tax of $3.00 per pack on all cigarettes possessed for sale or use in New York City. ($1.50 is New York State tax; $1.50 is New York City tax.)" The BATF website puts the current Federal Excise Tax on a pack of cigarettes at 39 cents. Adding those together, I get $3.39/pack for NYC vs. $4.05/pack for Chicago. What am I missing? (As I understand it, there's no separate county tax in NYC because each county is also a borough, right?)

[cruiser.livejournal.com]

Not according to a recent article in the New York Times. According to other web sites listing state cigarette taxes, NYC, as of January 1st, was $1.50 city, $1.50 state, $.39 federal.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Very good points all. The solution, I think, is not so much to tax cigarettes more heavily but to force tobacco companies to own up to the fact that what they are peddling is, in fact, a drug.

Except in order to do so you need to bring in the government again! D'oh!

What is the true small-government solution? Is it no taxes, no FDA, and assuming that market forces will ensure that tobacco only poisons as many people as are necessary to achieve an economic equilibrium?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yep, the orthodox libertarian position would be "It's your funeral, sucker." I'm not one of those wackos who thinks we can do without the FDA, however. Letting trial lawyers sue the living hell out of Big Tobacco seems to have had a salutary effect on company's willingness to go on denying the toxic effects of their products, but I'm not happy with where the money from the settlements ended up: Half in the pockets of those same trial lawyers, the other half for state governments to squander during the salad days of the 90s.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Very good points all. The solution, I think, is not so much to tax cigarettes more heavily but to force tobacco companies to own up to the fact that what they are peddling is, in fact, a drug.

Solution in what sense, though? If we treat it the way we treat other substances classified under the law as drugs, then that leads to the whole ban+illegal-sales+drug-war dynamic that we have now for most recreational drugs and that we had during Prohibition for alcohol. Assuming that's not the desired outcome, what is? Big government or small, what's the aim?

[datan0de.livejournal.com]

Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! May I link to this?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Be my guest.

Got Milk Tax?

[foodpoisoningsf.livejournal.com]

Milk is next...

Methane gases from all forms of cattle production are a major contributor to climate change, in addition to damage to fresh water resources and fisheries. It's entirely plausible that the butterfats in milk products are addictive and that the dependence on dairy products may be a factor in childhood obesity.

The immense size of the dairy industry here is one reason why MacDonald's and Burger King have been able to expand and remain profitable for decades- cheap beef. It's where all the worn-out dairy cows go.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The perverse thing, of course, is that milk is one of those commodities like sugar or ethanol that our government actually subsidises. In a sense, there already is a milk tax and a sugar tax--and they're of even less benefit to the average citizen than the cigarette tax.