California: Smoking Mad About Prop 86

I stopped to drop off a carton of cigarettes for a disabled veteran at a nursing home. They have a bleak area outside where they can enjoy a cigarette at fixed intervals. He was reading an absentee ballot about Proposition 86.

He said, “This is crazy! We can’t afford $70 for a carton of cigarettes. That’s the most prejudiced, hateful proposition I ever read.”

Then he asked me, “Can this pass?”

I said, “Are you old enough to remember bus segregation, because some people didn’t think some people looked as nice as they did?”

He said, “Haven’t we learned anything from history? Who’s promoting this crime, this time?”

I said, “They are people with a drug addiction. The drug of venomous, vindictive, cold-hearted hate. A drug ten times worse than heroin. It forms a hard callous around the heart, like a stone, and destroys logical, reasoning ability, so they can’t quit.”

He lifted his head from his hand, and looking up, through eyes like a saint’s, he said, “Then I feel sorry for them. Their burden is greater than mine.”

Not wanting to contaminate the virtue of his words, I said, “Yes, I guess we should feel sorry for them.”

What I really thought was, the trail of their whole life is littered with their victims. If they could eliminate every smoker on earth, they would just channel another fanatical, inflictive vendetta. It’s their drug of choice. They can’t quit.

The crazies that are calif will kill one of their golden gooses if this passes. The socialist state uses ciggy taxes to pay for all kinds of crap and if this passes folks will quit in droves.
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Ironically, Meathead Rob Reiner used to be against further cig tax increases in CA because it would threaten the revenue from his pet project do gooder pre-k for all agenda. Now that he is gone, they are finally free. Take a gander at the future to see what will happen to the $2.60 money grab from hard working Americans.

http://www.reason.org/commentaries/dalmia_20060316.shtml

And that's only if the cash cow continues. People aren't as dumb as the liberals want to believe.

Big Mac lovers, you are next. This was a great piece by Radley Balko from Cato. It's all about socialized health care.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5226

"This creeping socialization of medicine gives government new license to meddle with our private affairs. It creates a climate where excessive state interference in the most intimate of personal matters – what we put into our mouths – becomes not only acceptable among the electorate, but desirable. After all, if that cheeseburger you're eating clogs your arteries and puts you in the hospital, your poor choices will be reflected in my health insurance premiums. If you're on Medicare or Medicaid, it'll show up in my taxes.

That's exactly the argument the government put forward in the summer of 2004 when the Department of Health and Human Services announced that Medicare would consider covering the costs of obesity treatments, including diet plans, counseling, and gastro-bypass surgery, all new frontiers for preventative government intervention. HHS officials insisted that the change would save taxpayers money over the long haul if obesity were prevented or treated before the ill-health effects associated with the condition begin to present themselves.

It isn't difficult to see how this argument could be applied in a larger sense – that we need to tax fatty or sugary foods, for example, to save everyone money on health insurance premiums and to keep the obesity problem from bankrupting Medicare and Medicaid. In fact, that exact argument has been made – and by a credentialed conservative, no less. Writing on National Review Online, David Frum wrote:
And as Americans struggle with an epidemic of obesity - and the ensuing costs to the taxpayer - conservatives who favor (as almost all conservatives do favor) Medicare and Medicaid need to ask themselves whether their easy libertarian attitude to the worst practices of the fast food industry retains its relevance. Big Gulp drinks and super-sized fries are making America sick - and you are paying the bill. A little moderation would cure a lot of medical and fiscal ills; and a little incentive might induce that moderation.
It's bad enough hearing that kind of talk from the left. But when it comes from the right, too, it's a bad harbinger for what might be ahead.

George Will had a great piece about this topic too. His point was that this socialism only works if sales of cigarettes remain brisk forever.

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