How can Cigarette taxes make smoking less fun when smoking is deadly and dangerous in the first place?
Tax increases cause many smokers to quit According to a recent article in The Washington Post, all across the country, smokers are burning up telephone “quit” lines and enrolling in stop-smoking programs. Despite the ready availability of low cost loans to finance smoking habits, the latest boost in federal excise tax on a pack of cigarettes — from 39 cents to $1.01 — is driving people to wean themselves from their potentially deadly habits. Whenever the federal or state governments boost cigarette taxes, droves of smokers quit, or try to. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cigarette smoking and exposure to tobacco smoke caused 438,000 premature deaths in the United States each year from 1997 through 2001. Tobacco smoking cost the United States over $193 billion in 2004, including $97 billion in lost productivity and $96 billion in direct health care expenditures, or an average of $4,260 per adult smoker. So what could be wrong with even greater tax hikes? Giv
