Before I Forget

I have rambled on many times about the tyrannical anti-smoking laws in Montana. Given that states now rely on tobacco tax revenue it seems obvious that the big push to make smoking all but illegal is over – or at least on hiatus.

George Will wrote an excellent piece yesterday regarding the BIG class action lawsuit in Illinois.

I liked this part:

The states’ ability to continue treating the tobacco industry as a “budgetary Alaska” — the last frontier for exploitation — depends on brisk sales of cigarettes far into the future. So all 50 states, which in 2004 reaped $12.3 billion in cigarette taxes, have an incentive to carefully calibrate these taxes so as to maximize revenues. They want high taxes, but not high enough to cause large numbers of smokers to quit the habit that is so lucrative to states.

Of course the tobacco tax is highly regressive in practical terms. It’s interesting that the more “progressive” the state the more “regressive” the tax.

Anyhow, read the whole thing.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2006 at 4:14 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.