USUALLY, I would wait until later in the year to protest a proposed $2.60-per-pack tax on cigarettes. But it's such a rotten idea, I can't wait. (No, I don't smoke.) Huge new taxes on specific groups of people create weird backlashes, probably skyrocketing sales of black-market cigarettes as smokers find creative ways to avoid this huge grab at their wallets. But far worse, the proposed $2.1 billion tax is horribly backward. It uses scandalously little of the windfall to pay for research into lung cancer or other smokers' diseases -- 2 percent. Instead this measure would transfer money from smokers'...