Government Needs You to Smoke

If you smoke, please don't quit. If you don't smoke, it's time to start. Your government needs the tax money:

Just a year after smokers were slapped with the single largest federal tobacco tax increase ever, public health advocates are urging states to follow up with their own cigarette tax hikes to offset declining revenues lost in the recession and to press more people into giving up smoking.

A new report by a coalition of public health organizations says states could raise more than $9 billion in new annual revenue by increasing cigarette taxes by $1 per pack.

The idea that they want to raise taxes in order to get people to quit is simply nonsense. If smokers quit in large numbers numerous federal and local programs funded by smoking would collapse. That's the last thing they want.

If smoking is as bad as they tell us it is, why not simply ban the product? We've banned lots of other things, such as certain aerosol propellants that might harm the ozone layer, but we won't ban a product that when used as designed can kill you or at the very least damage your health. In fact, we probably still subsidize the farms that grow the tobacco, and in some areas Indian tribes are allowed to sell cigarettes tax free.

It's all about the money. The government knows that many smokers, probably a large majority of them, either don't want to quit or can't quit. They have a captive audience of people who will pay the higher taxes because of their addiction and the government is playing them for all they're worth. It's a shell game.