States and Cancer Foes Banking on Smokers to Spur Economic Growth

A coalition of prominent public health organizations is rallying behind a new report that shows just how valuable cigarette smokers are to cash-strapped states’ economies. Citing a “mountain of evidence” to compel North Carolina legislators to increase ‘sin taxes’ on smokers so they can “save lives,” hidden in the smokescreen is the ultimate goal of harvesting hundreds of millions in revenue by exploiting cigarette smokers’ addictions as opposed to trying to help them quit.

One might assume the North Carolina Alliance for Health (NCAH), an organization whose membership roster includes the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network and American Lung Association, is opposed to cigarette smoking because of its perceived adverse direct and indirect health risks, but that is just a component of their tobacco-related lobbying in the State. According to Pam Seamans, executive director of the NCAH, the State shouldn’t go too far in punishing cigarette smokers if it wants to break-out of its economic slump.

“[R]aising the cigarette tax is exactly what North Carolina needs to help tackle our budget problems,” Seamans said while touting a new report that concludes a “$1 cigarette tax increase will produce large, sustained revenue needed to cut North Carolina budget deficit.” Read more

smoke nazis just can’t make up their minds.. cigarettes are bad, but they bring money. taxes will make people quit, but don’t raise them too high or you’ll lose revenue. cigarette taxes fund programs, but pass laws to limit where people can smoke...

Years ago - when the left was in the feeding frenzy about doing away with tobacco - Rush Limbaugh predicted that this would happen...when the money runs low from the tobacco tax, they will change their tune.

This is soooo funny....another prime example of the "law of unintended consequences" that the left keeps tripping over.

No, it won’t produce revenues you morons. Smokers will just quit smoking. I did several years ago when they raised the taxes to the point where they cost double what they did just a year before. More and more will just quit and you’ll be without all those taxes you count on.

Thomas Jefferson:

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat in our drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labors and in our amusements, for our callings and our creeds...our people.. must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live.. We have not time to think, no means of calling the mis-managers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow suffers. Our landholders, too...retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must...be contented with penury, obscurity and exile.. private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance.

This is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."

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