Tobacco Tax, Warm Dispute

Smoking is still an important public issue, because smoking remains the number one source of preventable morbidity and premature mortality in California, in the United States, and in the world. The California’s financial crisis lessens. That’s why the state’s politicians are now more interested in how to help the state fiscal and political pressure. That’s why the state’s cigarette tax was raised, now 87 cents a pack.

The American Cancer Society and other anti-tobacco groups are urging a higher tax on smoking and other tobacco use, referring raises in other states, 10 just this year, that have made California’s tax comparatively low. The Legislature’s majority Democrats have already confirmed a $1.50-per-pack increase that they argue would raise $1.2 billion a year.

Any increase in tobacco taxes, however, would need at least some Republican assistance due to of the lawful request for two-thirds votes on new taxes. So it’s not unexpected that Tobacco Industries have been sloping up their resistance, assessing a study of cigarette taxes by the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy disputing that more than a third of the cigarettes consumed in California now are from the black market.

The tobacco companies reported that raising cigarette taxes would promote more tobacco contrabands and lack to produce the alleged $1.2 billion in new incomes. Taxing cigarettes is politically attractive because polls consistently show it to be one of the few popular levies. However, some critics argue that it’s a regressive tax that falls mostly on lower income consumers, and that tobacco revenues will fade as smoking declines, making it an unstable source of money.

Statistics show that Californians smoked almost 150 packs of cigarettes per capita per year four decades ago, but their use have dropped to under 40 packs, some 1.4 billion packs a year in all. Two voter-approved increases, one in 1988 and another a decade later raised the state’s cigarette tax from 10 cents a pack to 87 cents. It drags in less than a billion dollars today. The almost tripling in the current levy would hardly double the state income because of continued declines in smoking and at least some increase in smuggling untaxed cigarettes into the state, concluded scientists.

California may boast the highest population in the country, but the states with the highest smoking populations are Arkansas, Nevada, New Mexico, and West Virginia.