03 Jan 2006
The States' Tobacco Addiction

Man, does George Will ever hit this nail right on the head: this oughta piss you off no matter how you feel about smoking:

The states' ability to continue treating the tobacco industry as a "budgetary Alaska" -- the last frontier for exploitation -- depends on brisk sales of cigarettes far into the future. So all 50 states, which in 2004 reaped $12.3 billion in cigarette taxes, have an incentive to carefully calibrate these taxes so as to maximize revenue. They want high taxes, but not high enough to cause large numbers of smokers to quit the habit that is so lucrative to states.

This is enough to make me want to quit or grow my own! The government's depending on the addictive power of tobacco to keep their budgets balanced and the dollars flowing in - something that heretofore was a province of the tobacco cartel alone.

It also explains why a large part of the "anti-smoking" effort has thus far gone into what I like to call "hiding smoking". Ban it in public places, shuffle the smokers off and away. This makes the anti-smoking political zealots think you're actually doing something constructive: out of sight is out of mind. Just hope that they don't really quit, because that would be a budgetary disaster of the first magnitude.

Philip Morris is America's largest maker of cigarettes, a product legal to use but problematic to merchandise legally. Cigarettes are stigmatized by common sense and all state governments. But because those governments are increasingly addicted to cigarette tax revenue, the governments must be careful not to make cigarettes so expensive they do not sell well.

(link) [Washington Post]

via Overlawyered

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