Addicted to Sin (Taxes).
In cleaning up my web server, I found a number of essays that pre-date this blog. Call it proto-blogging. Here's one from June, 2002.

People have often observed that government programs sometimes work at cross-purposes. The military guts and completely renovates a building at a base—just before the entire base is closed. The Small Business Administration promotes small business development through helping provide loan packages—while OSHA, EPA, and an alphabet soup of agencies make sure that businesses don’t get too successful, at least without proper government permission.

The Department of Agriculture conducts research into how to raise hogs with less fat, but it also pays farmers to not raise hogs at all. And of course, tobacco farmers get subsidies for growing demon weed, while the Surgeon General oversees an office that tries to discourage smoking.

Meanwhile, the agreement between most of the states and the major tobacco companies is absurd on many accounts. Start with the requirement that the tobacco companies donate buckets of money to anti-smoking groups who then produce TV commercials blasting the same tobacco companies.

Another absurdity is the fact that politicians tell us with a straight face that smoking is bad and costly to society—-even as they become increasingly addicted to cigarette taxes.

You thought nicotine was addictive? What’s even more addictive than nicotine, it turns out, are taxes on nicotine. Numerous states levy hefty per-pack cigarette taxes, and tax rates are increasing every year. In Kansas, for example, Governor Bill Graves suggests hiking that state’s 24 cents-per-pack tax by 65 cents—making the tax nearly four times as high was it was in May 2002. In Ohio, state senators called for tripling the state’s cigarette tax, to 74 cents. So, governments, which allegedly want to discourage smoking and recover “social costs” of smoking, will need people to continue smoking.

It’s no surprise, then, that a report by the General Accounting Office, published in June of 2001, found that states are soft-peddling their efforts to stop smoking. Only 7 percent of the money given to them under the Master Settlement Agreement has been spent on anti-smoking activities. Politicians may not want people to continue smoking . . . but they certainly benefit from the tobacco money to feed ever-larger budgets.

But why should anyone complain about these taxes? Aren’t they voluntary, anyway, and more like user fees? Well, I’m all for user fees, under which people who benefit from a government service pay for it. Roadway tolls that are used to pay for the building and maintenance of expressways are one good example. So are hunting and fishing license fees, which help fund game conservation efforts.

But smokers already pay a user fee—the money they pay to the tobacco companies and their distributors. A user fee pays the entity that produces the good or service. Governments do not produce tobacco products, cigarette companies. Of course, governments have long claimed a take on cigarettes (and liquor), under the label of "sin" taxes, levied, allegedly, to persuade people to refrain from engaging in sinful activities.

But now, government budgets, bloated by a spending spree of the 1990s, are increasingly going with the expectation that people will continue to sin. So, while anti-smoking campaigns continue to roll along, the smoking dough continues to roll in.

Labels: Taxes

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