Are Cigarette Taxes Becoming Unethical?For years, states have placed hefty taxes on cigarettes and other "vice" commodities to increase revenue for the state. The logic being that if you insist on smoking, you'll pay for it, and at least others will benefit from your ever-more vilified choice to be a smoker.
And now Massachussetts, New York, and possibly several other states are presently considering a tax hike of $1 per pack, boosting the price of a single pack of cigarettes to more than $8.
This is an astronomic price for something that costs so little to make, but clearly people are willing to pay it. When I was in high school, circa 1990, I remember a friend telling me one day that if cigarettes ever reached $2 per pack, he'd quit. I thought, Yeah, right -- cigarettes will never cost that much. (They were around $1.25 at the time).
Well, they reached $2 by the end of the next year, and my friend kept smoking. I last saw him a few years ago, and he was still as much a chain-smoker as ever, and with 20 years invested in his habit, showed no signs of quitting.
Of course, you can find plenty of statistics to the contrary. When Iowa introduced a tax hike on cigarettes, in March of 2007, that state's cigarette sales dropped by 36%. The theory is that young smokers, or would-be smokers, simply don't start now because they can't afford it.
And maybe this will work, in the long run. But as much as I'm against smoking, I wonder kind of statement these taxes are making.
Smoking is an addiction, and addiction, as we have learned in our enlightened age, is a disease. When states like New York and Massachusetts roll out these punitive measures with such an obvious agenda -- to make money for the state -- smokers not only lose, they're being used.
With the health care crises facing our country now, wouldn't these states be more wise to invest resources in helping people quit, rather than simply fleecing them for cash? Put another way, how well do you think a cocaine or heroin tax would go over? Just imagine the outcry if those drugs were legalized and turned into a cash cow for state governments.
For more information on cigarettes and tobacco, visit the Centers for Disease Control Website.
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Although I agree that smoking is an addiction and it could seem unethical to continue to raise prices for the state's financial gain, this is not a one sided story.
Being from one of the states you mentioned (Mass.) and living in the other (NY), I can see that the state governments are also assisting those who wish to quit their addiction.
A TV campaign in NY (including my personal favorite, where a man spills coffee on himself 10 times before getting it right, followed by the tagline, "If you can learn to drink coffee without smoking, you can learn to do anything.") shows that the state are also out to help. Free nicotine patches were/may still be offered for those looking to quit.
Support groups can also be found on the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene website: http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/smoke/quit.shtml. Massachusetts has it's own similar campaign with information at http://www.trytostop.org/.
If the rising costs coupled with these quitting efforts are not enough for people to make a change, then I say tax away.
The taxes on cigarettes do not even begin to capture the healthcare costs associated with smoking. In a society where a significant number of people are uninsured or underinsured, a hefty chunk of those costs fall back on the government. A two-pack-a-day smoker would pay less than $1500 a year in taxes if cigarettes are taxed at $2 a pack, but one hospitalization for, say, a heart attack can easily run over $100,000. So, if we want to reduce or eliminate taxes on cigarettes, maybe we should require smokers to cover the medical costs associated with smoking out of pocket (i.e. no insurance coverage, either by the government or by private insurers). And that does not even begin to capture the costs to employers for lost time at work or the health risks of second-hand smoke, etc.
If smokers have to pay higher taxes, they should be the sole beneficiaries of those taxes. All the money should go pay their health care costs or to fund smoking cessation programs. Funding programs that nonsmokers is the unethical part. Mykolos wants smokers to pay their own way? They are already paying their own way. The tax money should stay with them.
To paraphrase the late great Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, you are entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. Topcard, the fact is that smokers do NOT pay their own way. Taxes on cigarettes do not come close to paying the health care costs for smoking-related illness and death. Non-smokers end up subsidizing the habit, both in our medical premiums and in our taxes.
I think we should keep in mind that cigarette taxes target people with addictions and while its fine and dandy to be righteous and say smokers should quit, the reason these taxes exist is because states know that addicted people will buy them anyway. Are you so naive as to think that states really expect people to quit and thereby lose their tax revenue. They plan budgets on these taxes. As for facts, the patch doesn't work for everybody. Quitting can be a huge ordeal that some people just can't balance with the rest of their life. Reality is that poor families are more likely to buy less groceries to afford higher priced cigarettes (less healthy children, bigger burden on health care). Withdrawal from smoking contributes to higher rates of domestic violence. Maybe, if the cigarettes cost less, smokers could afford health care. I just wonder how it became acceptable to tax sick people. Non smokers have to realize that all these happy adds about quitting smoking are purposely cheerful and encouraging. The reality is more harsh and a lot harder to solve than slapping a tax on like a bandaid.
Cigarette taxes can certainly be regressive, imposing a larger burden on lower income tax payers. I agree that this is a problem and we should move to a more progressive tax structure overall. I would also strongly support increasing benefits to poor families, especially children. And I do not know anyone who wants more domestic violence. Having said all of that, these things really have nothing to do with the argument about cigarette taxes. You can make the tax system more progressive and increase benefits to poor people and institute better support for victims of domestic violence while raising cigarette taxes. They are not mutually exclusive.
Yes, I believe that governments want people to quit smoking because fewer smokers mean lower health care costs. The rising cost of health care is much bigger budget headache than the loss of cigarette tax income. The primary government agencies that might suffer financially from a reduction in smoking would be Social Security and government pension funds because non-smokers live longer and therefore collect more retirement benefits. So unless the agency benefits from premature death, it would benefit from a reduction in tobacco use. Pretty macabre, eh?
It is not exactly breaking news that use of tobacco is an addiction or that it is hard to quit smoking. We all get that. It is also not clear that increased cigarette taxes will make people quit. Economists will tell you that consumer demand for cigarettes is not very price sensitive once you are addicted, though it might keep some teenagers from taking up the habit. All I am saying is that until cigarette taxes increase to the point that they cover the government expenditures for smoking-related health care, non-smoking tax payers are subsizing the tobacco habits of smokers. And that policy does not seem particularly rational to me.