In the past, I never took issue with the obscenely high cigarette taxes in the U.S ($4 per pack in Washington State). I also knew that cigarette smoking was, unsurprisingly, quite prevalent among the low-income. However, I did not make the connection, did not realize the perverse injustice of this arrangement until seeing the sharp contrast of Argentine cigarette culture.
In my opinion, there are two main reasons for smoking:
For fun. It’s a part of the culture or subculture, and/or it’s a drug that feels nice. A dying breed in the US as smoking becomes less and less acceptable.
Relief from the grim reality of the world. Injustice, poverty, and the seemingly impossible struggle to escape from this. The CDC claims that half of US smokers are low-income, and I think we can safely say that this is their motivation.
In Argentina, you’ll find both; smoking is quite common among all social classes, and an accepted part of the bourgeois lifestyle. They are relatively cheap, $1.70 per pack. The reverse sticker shock got me thinking, why are cigarettes so heavily taxed in the U.S.? Who is being taxed and to what effect?
The general rationale for cigarette taxes is that smoking is a bad choice; therefore there is every reason to tax it and no reason not to. Hopefully, it will discourage people from smoking and make for a healthier society.
This is a very convenient and easy thing to say if you live a comfortable, middle class lifestyle, someone legislating or advocating for higher cigarette taxes. It’s also a very paternalistic and condescending thing to say to someone who works a dead-end job and gets nothing out of it, no money, no self-worth, no healthcare, no housing security. If lawmakers had any fragment of basic empathy, they would realize that taxing these people through the nose is a horrible thing to do. As far as I can tell, they are using a legal and rather mild drug to relieve the depressing reality that is everyday life. If we care about these people, we ought to work for a world in which they fell good without cigarettes rather than punishing them for smoking.
Liberals like to go on about regressive taxes, taxes that take a higher percentage of the poor people’s income than that of the rich. They conveniently never mention cigarette taxes. Sure, it’s a “choice,” but I’m of the opinion that people from the middle class, myself included, have no business telling poor people what choices they should be making.
Tax private jets, tax hummers, tax the repackaging of subprime adjustable-rate mortgages, tax the windfall profits of health insurance companies that let people die rather than approve necessary procedures. These too involve choices, and they fuck up many people’s lives, rather than merely damaging the health of the person making the choice. Hell, tax smokers who can afford to pay taxes, but keep your hands out of the pockets of hardworking people who just want break.
Rachel Alexander • Oct 16, 2011 at 5:44 pm
I understand that cigarette taxes are incredibly regressive. However, your claim that smoking doesn’t hurt anyone else is demonstrably false. Second-hand smoke affects people who have no choice in the matter. And smokers have higher healthcare costs than non-smokers, since they’re much more likely to get lung cancer and other diseases from smoking. If their healthcare is paid for by the state (which it’s more likely to be if they’re low income), than their smoking does affect other people and costs the government more money.
It’s entirely possible that we’ve gone too far with cigarette taxes in the US, but I believe penalizing things that aren’t healthy is good public policy. Rather than advocating no taxes on cigarettes, I would say tax them and increase direct income subsidies to poor people. The net impact is the same, but there’s still an economic incentive to quit. And you discourage young people from starting to smoke. I’m pretty sure a lot more high school kids would start smoking if cigarettes weren’t almost $11 a pack.