Could the tobacco tax hinder government anti-smoking efforts?
Although ACSH has been making the same point for years, we were nevertheless disturbed by new evidence of the government’s dependency on tobacco taxes noted by Stephanie Saul’s article in the New York Times. The federal government collects $7 billion annually from sales of cigarettes, and some state governments are attempting to ease their mounting budget deficits by raising cigarette taxes. As the article points out, these figures cannot be ignored when examining the House’s overwhelming passage of a tobacco regulation bill that leaves profitable menthol cigarettes untouched. “The reliance of government coffers on the taxes smokers pay, and on the tobacco settlement money, essentially provides a financial cushion for state governments and could be viewed as a government guarantee for the survival of the tobacco industry,” Saul writes. “Would politicians shut down an industry that supplies so much money?” Stier, for one, doesn’t think so. “The government is addicted to cigarette taxes,
