And:
Posted on 10/14/2005 6:34:56 PM PDT by Crackingham
Gov. Matt Blunt has publicly opposed a cigarette tax increase, but some key GOP players are quietly working to make sure voters pass it in November 2006.
The Committee for a Healthy Future, the group promoting the ballot initiative to increase cigarette taxes by 80 cents a pack, has hired John Hancock, a spokesman and consultant for the Missouri Republican Party, as a strategist. Hancock was constantly at the side of Blunt, a Republican, during his 2004 campaign for governor.
The campaign also has hired two other Republicans as consultants: Jewell Patek, a former lawmaker who later served as an aide to Blunt when he was secretary of state, and David Barklage, who served as chief of staff to former state Sen. Peter Kinder, now lieutenant governor.
Blunt’s spokesmen have been saying since June that the governor is opposed to increasing the cigarette tax or any other tax, even though lawmakers are struggling to find long-term solutions to address health-care needs for the poor and uninsured.
Jack Cardetti, Missouri Democratic Party spokesman, said the involvement of top Republicans in the tax initiative campaign brings into question whether Blunt truly opposes the idea.
“If Matt Blunt really wanted to kill this proposal, he could make three phone calls and it’d be dead within the month,” Cardetti said.
Blunt’s spokesman, Spence Jackson, said the governor has nothing to do with the contracts Hancock and other Republican consultants take.
“Reasonable people often disagree on issues,” Jackson said. “This is obviously an area of disagreement.”
Proponents of the cigarette tax also have hired two well-connected Democrats –– Steve Glorioso, a Kansas City political strategist who worked on Claire McCaskill’s campaign for governor, and Chuck Hatfield, a Jefferson City lawyer who served as Attorney General Jay Nixon’s chief of staff.
Missouri, which has the third-highest smoking rate in the nation, has the 49th-lowest cigarette tax at 17 cents a pack. Kansas, with a tax of 79 cents per pack, has the 27th-lowest cigarette tax.
The proposed 80-cent tax increase in Missouri would raise an estimated $351 million a year, with $61 million of that going to anti-smoking programs, $100 million to treatment of chronic diseases and smoking-related illnesses among the poor and $190 million to increase Medicaid fees to health-care providers. The Missouri Hospital Association and other health organizations are bankrolling the campaign.
Blunt and the Republican-led legislature this year cut 90,000 people off Medicaid.
The governor, who has been fiercely attacked over the Medicaid cuts, has to know that the cigarette tax would help him politically, Cardetti said.
“He wants both the benefit of the added revenue and the benefit of not supporting a tax increase,” Cardetti said.
“This (Blunt’s opposition) is extremely disingenuous.”
It wasn't lump sum, but the figure is correct. It all went into the general 'slush' fund, except for the amount that the lawyers squabbled over.
The lawyer fight was akin to throwing chum into a school of sharks. They lined up to sue each other and the state for their piece of the pie, and thats what the whole thing was about. It had nothing to do with reimbursement for health costs of smokers and everything to do with billable hours from law firms.
Kids were doing B and Es back in the early 50s when butts were $.23 a pack. The wiseguys were running untaxed butts from the Carolinas to NYC and Boston in the same time frame.
Imagine what a trailer full of cigarettes is worth today. Why you probably have to pay the Teamster over-the-road guy $10,000 to take that fake whack on the head these days. Outrageous!
Yes you can. And you can eventually end up with government involved in every aspect of your life determining what taxes to levy on you in pursuit of a perfectly equitable society, as determined by politicians and the special interest groups they represent.
The Florida suit, for example, alleges that the state spends $290 million annually on smoking-related illnesses. Yet in 1994 tobacco taxes added $1.9 billion to Florida's coffers, to say nothing of the $2.9 billion it contributed to state worker compensation funds.
Nor is smoking a net burden on society as a whole. Economist W. Kip Viscusi of Duke University calculates that the total social cost of smoking-related disease, sick-leave, fires, excess life insurance, and foregone Social Security taxes amounts to $1.32 per pack. Yet, because smokers on average die earlier than nonsmokers, they save society $1.47 per pack in costs that otherwise might have been incurred for nursing homes, pensions payments, Social Security benefits and other insurance costs.
When one considers that smokers additionally pay tobacco taxes that average 53 cents per pack, one is hard-pressed to show that smokers are a net burden on anyone. If anything, society owes them money."
And:
And:
Appreciate it.
I could find it myself but I'm just lazy today. ;^)
I agree microgood. Our health premiums are outrageous. We smoke, don't intend to quit any time soon, but the gist of the matter, imho, is the gooberment on Crapitol Hill, talk a big talk about tobacco like it was the plague, but if you really want to see them get their drawers in a wad, just start a movement to BAN tobacco products and watch them in full melt-down..........taxes on tobacco products are where they get their pork money. They grandstand about the evils of tobacco, but they don't want it to go under. Damned two-faced hypocrites!
I can only imagine the public outcry if they decided to put this kind of burden on those who drink coffee, or a one gallon jug of Mountain Dew every morning.
Had the tobacco companies simply pulled their products off the shelves the states would have SOL
"This is not true. If you look at how much more smokers pay in taxes than other people, they pay way more than any offset in their costs."
I find that hard to believe. The CDC says that one fifth of all deaths in the United States are from smoking. The conditions caused by smoking of heart disease and cancers tend to cause lingering deaths. For example my wife's father has been given less than a week to live from lung cancer. This is the fourth time he has been told that. He has now spent five months in the hospital over the last three years. The costs have been enormous, exceeding his lifetime earnings,not just the taxes he paid.
CDC Cigarette Smoking-Related Mortality
"Every one of those states that presented that argument kept the part about lottery revenue going to the education fund, put neglected to actually lower your taxes.
"Expect the same to happen with this. It won't lower your taxes one thin dime."
"This is just another revenue grab and they will use people like you to do it."
I basically agree with these, except the last one that was a bit personal and mean. Any money the government gets their hands on will be absorbed and I expect no direct merit from it. But essential services have to be paid for somehow and taxes on cigarettes seem to me to be as good a way as any.
"The purpose of the guberment is to provide for the domestic security of the nation, and a limited, defined set of necessities. It is NOT the job, the duty, the prerogative, or the guberment's business to tax based on someone's idea of what is good for everyone one else. Taxes are to be assesed to fund the subjects I have mentioned. That's all."
I agree the scope of government is far to large. But something has to be taxed to pay for it. My argument was that in selecting what to tax it should be done in a way to do as little harm as possible. By targeting items that do great harm to society we at least do some good.
"But, hey, since alcohol is socially acceptable relative to tobacco it's OK to tax a smoker to pay for the costs of alcohol consumption."
Alcohol is taxed more than other items. I believe there is a difference between the effect of alcohol and cigarettes. About 10% of alcohol users wind up addicted whereas the addiction rate for cigarette smokers approaches 100%
"Nothing conservative about this tax you support, so I guess you would put it under "reactionary", hence a negative doctrine?"
Taxes on individual items are quite old. Of course the government does need to be careful about how its done and all taxation should only happen with representation. The Boston tea party and all that...
Many smokers don't work at all. Most mental patients smoke like factories. So do the homeless. They go through pack after pack.
I totally understand the indignation every time big nanny taxes somebody through the shorts, but in this case they are hitting a lot of people who don't produce a thing.
Of course, government will then blow it all on foolishness, but that's another story.
Baloney!
Odd. I haven't seen an addicted smoker run over anybody or destroy lots of property lately. I also haven't seen a smoker fighting, beating his wife, inflicting emotional and physical damage on all of his loved ones, missing inordinate time at work, destroying his liver and a host of other organs, consuming enormous amounts of law enforcement resources, requiring repitive and continuous rehabilitative therapies - Often at public expense, or any of the other very destructive, socially and financially costly things that drinkers (And not just alcoholics) do or are afflicted with on a regular, predictable basis.
Hence my call to tax alcohol to reimburse Gov't for these costs. Or better yet, increase the penalties for abuse and the assessment of fines as a means of recompense. That gets it into the realm of a 'User Fee' which is, IMO, exactly where it should be.
Hope this helps:
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