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Originally Posted by A Very Super Market
I see this as a beneficial incentive to quit smoking, with a side-effect of paying for low-incomers.
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I strongly disagree with this and similar sentiments. Although the state has been "picking winners" in industry for years, it has not become more acceptable.
Firstly, policies of this type, whether they be taxes or subsidies, encourage harmful entanglement of state and private interests. People complain all the time about lobbyists getting this or that stupid thing pushed through Congress, and yet rarely stop to think why Congress has the power to do such things for them. In truth, they do not and were never intended to. The Constitution is very, very clear on the issues of uniform taxation and limitation of taxation in general in Article 1 Sections 8 and 9. It also enumerates the purposes for which said levees may be used, and promotion of the public health is not listed amongst them. Combined with the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states and to the people, all powers not declared to be the domain of the Congress, this legislation can only be viewed as violating the Constitution in spirit, and indeed, in letter as well.
As I said before, this is nothing new. The state often adjusts taxes or provides subsidies to encourage what they believe to be beneficial growth. These programs are not only unfair, they also fail to produce acceptable results.
To this day, every taxpayer continues to pay for failed subsidy initiatives of the past. Agricultural subsidies/incentives run into billions of dollars per year. They were designed to aid struggling individual farms, but despite these efforts corporate farms control the overwhelming majority of U.S. agricultural production, and they
still get subsidized.
Another good example is the cornucopia of subsidies for establishing overseas franchises and capital interests. People bitch about outsourcing all the time, and yet their government helps to fund it. There are literally hundreds of tax penalties on industries and industrial processes that used to be prominent in the U.S.; Coal, steel, various types of raw materials refining, etc. etc. Which is to say nothing of the taxes more contemporary industries are beset by, some moreso than others.
This cigarrette tax will be no different. For one thing, the majority of smokers are lower-income citizens anyway. Call me crazy, but taking everyone's tax dollars, passing them through a huge and vastly inefficient state machine, and then giving some of that to lower-income citizens, thus helping them to afford the price hikes in cigarrettes, seems pretty stupid to me. Another interesting thought is what will happen to the multi-billion dollar tobacco industry and the employees thereof if middle-class consumption drops. My guess is that should the state pursue its' persecution of the tobacco industry, it will simply move elsewhere or find new markets, as so many have done before.
Finally, there is the question of whether or not anyone in this country has the right to use legal force to discourage an individual's right to use tobacco any other controlled substance. Users are informed of the potentially harmful effects of such habits and I do agree with the legislation that requires that. Anything beyond that is unacceptable. It is not the place of the state, or the citizenry, or anyone else to force their will upon others' decision-making freedom whether it is in their best interests or not.
If the power to choose for oneself wrongly is taken from the individual, the power to choose for oneself correctly is in extreme jepoardy, as so many states have demonstrated so frequently throughout history.