quote:

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Whether lawmakers return to Augusta this summer or wait to face a shortfall in January, they will be looking for a source of revenue to help pay, among other things, steeply rising health care costs. And they will look, illogically enough, at the Fund for a Healthy Maine, which emphasizes smoking prevention and therefore saves Maine health care money. Before lawmakers take even more money from that fund, they should raise taxes.


Or, more specifically, a tax. The current cigarette tax is $1. The average, per-pack cost in direct medical care produced by smoking is $4.30, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The difference in the tax and the cost of medical care is paid by the public either through higher private insurance costs or through taxes for Medicaid, Medicare and state and local public employee health plans. The annual contribution of about $55 million from the tobacco companies to the state still leaves the gap at more than $300 million every year.

Why, legislators should be asked, are Maine taxpayers required to subsidize the cost of cigarettes? Smoking, the new tobacco ads point out, is an adult choice. It certainly has adult consequences and should have an adult price.

Maine and most other states already have found that raising the cigarette tax is a highly effective way to discourage teen-agers from starting the habit. Maine’s smoking rate drops each time the tax goes up and the rate stays down. This is a long-term benefit to individual health, health care costs and worker productivity. Maine leaders talk endlessly about improving the state’s business climate; raising the cigarette tax results in a healthier working population and lower health-insurance bills. That’s a considerable improvement to the climate.

Tobacco lobbyists will argue that taxing something just because it is bad for you pushes Maine way down a slippery slope of fiscal nitpicking. What about alcohol or french fries or a bologna sandwich, they’ll ask, should they too be taxed? Two replies: A glass of wine or a fatty sandwich at least has some health or nutrition benefit, unlike cigarettes, and does not drive up health care dollars anywhere near the extent cigarettes do. Second, what about them? If someone can make the case that these products are harmful and costly to the public, tax them more heavily and drop the heavy taxes on property and income.

One-third of the Fund for a Healthy Maine — the tobacco money — now goes into the General Fund. The $180 million shortfall in the current budget makes it a target for more cuts, but a 50- or 60-cent increase in the tobacco tax would produce $50 million a year, reduce teen smoking further and cut tax-supported health costs brought on by smoking. After years of forcing taxpayers to subsidize this deadly habit, lawmakers should give nonsmokers a break.

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Can anyone doubt why I my blood boils when I read these downright deceitful, dishonest and inaccurate LIES?

Now I know WHY the Bangor Daily News did NOT print my letter about the PTFM spending $14,500 at the ractrack at Wiscasset, and I sent that letter in TWICE!

The Bangor Daily News is a LIBERAL RAG and it is not fair and balanced. I see it more every day.

If any of you feel compelled to send a letter off this the Editor Coward who could not even give his name, you can send the letter to: letters@bangordailynews.net

The article can be read Unsubsidize Cigarettes

They might not get printed, but I think if enough outrage is sent to the BDN, they might get the picture. One can only hope......

I'd be asking why Maine is different from the rest of the country in that smokers more than pay their way in medical costs to the point nonsmokers are being subsidized by smokers. And yes, that includes anti-smokers.

Surely there can be no doubt about this since it has been proven time and time again, much to the anti-smoker’s chagrin.

Here is a wonderful letter written by Madame Dufarge:

Watching the Maine State Legislature in action these days is like watching a slow-motion train wreck.

Champagne tastes and beer budgets are placing a punitive tax burden on the approximately 289,000 smoking Mainers who are getting fed up with being treated like a red-headed stepchild by Legislators, "advocates," anti-tobacco "activists" and professional busybodies.

"Statistics" from discredited sources are presented as credible and groups with a clear anti-smoking agenda are being employed as foot soldiers by tax-hungry legislators in their unending quest to wring every last cent possible out of increasingly impoverished smokers.

According to the U. S. Census, the current population of Maine is 1,274,923. It is claimed that health care costs for smokers are $355 million per year. The percentage of Mainers who smoke is 22.7. This translates to 289,407 people, and calculates out to $1,226/year in health care costs for smokers.

Since the state claims $4.7 billion per year in total health care costs, the remaining population of non-smokers is costing the state $4,408/year in health care costs.

So the confiscatory taxation and demonization of smokers is all a smoke and mirrors campaign by interested parties who stand to gain from these actions, and provides cover for legislators too cowardly to do the right thing and behave in a fiscally responsible manner. Who have to face angry constituents who think the government owes them cradle-to-grave goodies and "services" when you can just rob the new class of Untouchables, the smokers?

The whole formula is a dead-end one, overtax cigarettes so that people won’t smoke, but depend on tax revenue from smokers to balance budgets and pay for pet projects. What happens if your Utopian scheme works and a large percentage of smokers quits? Will you tax the remaining ones $10 a pack? Get real. I guess you’ll have to move on to another class of citizens to oppress, after you’ve successfully demonized them and softened them up for the kill.

Since shame doesn’t seem to work with you, why don’t you try math?

Have you ever once considered that the theory of taxing a state into prosperity is right out of the Karl Marx Handbook? Have you ever once considered that the main reason businesses aren’t flocking to Maine could be the Maine Legislature?

God help us.

I reserve the right to steal as much of that letter as possible and replace the word "Maine" with "Minnesota" as often as I want to.

Dan! Like we all say: If you need it and can use it, it's yours!

Darlene, thanks for Madame Dufarge's letter; it's a keeper.

As the old saying has it, if you torture the data long enough, they'll confess to anything.

For instance, we hear "A smoker dies every 13 seconds."

Fact: A person dies every 1.7 seconds. Since 25% or so of the world's population smokes, the smoker's odds are better than average.

We hear "1200 smokers are killed by tobacco every day in the US."

Fact: 6575 people are "killed" by something every day in the US. If 25% of them were smokers as in the general population, you'd expect that 1643 smokers would die every day. We're 443 short.

We hear: 400,000 smokers die (prematurely) every year--actually they say "Tobacco kills 400,00 people every year." We know and can prove that 70,000 of them are far over the accepted life expectancy, so that leaves 330.000.

Fact: In the US, 2-1/2 million people die every year. Subtract that 330,000 smokers and you still have more than 2 million. How many of [I]them{/I] die "prematurely"? I'm not sure yet, but I will find out. And it will make a great soundbyte.

Well, hear it from a professor with a REAL Ph.D. in economics.
http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i38/38a01401.htm

Darlene, don't know who Madame Dufarge is, but I sure love the way she bites back.

Btw, she understands that balance I talked about in another post where she says:

"The whole formula is a dead-end one, overtax cigarettes so that people won’t smoke, but depend on tax revenue from smokers to balance budgets and pay for pet projects. What happens if your Utopian scheme works and a large percentage of smokers quits? Will you tax the remaining ones $10 a pack? Get real. "

She knows legislators can't maintain that balance forever as more and more smokers quite. Eventually the house of cards they've build for themselves will crumble.

Wow, thanks so much Darlene, Spinner, and Lock, for all this great information – Dufarge’s letter, Spinner’s facts, and to top it off the article on Viscusi. They’re ALL keepers and need to be used.

Apparently, the tobacco control crowd didn’t count on anyone doing the math.

Actually, dear Spinner, if you take the U.S. population of 300,000,000 and divide it by the average life expectancy of 75 years, you get 4,000,000 (FOUR MILLION) Americans die every year. And 250,000 of them are killed by doctors.

Mark, thanks for reminding us those 250,000 deaths per year reportedly caused by (gasp) physicians.

Published in JAMA, no less.

Here's the link:
http://www.mercola.com/2000/jul/30/doctors_death.htm

Funny how the media didn't pick up on this. As stated by the author reporting on this, "I did find it most curious that the best wire service in the world, Reuters, did not pick up on this article. I have no idea why they let it slip by."

Well, hmmm.

Markfive, I didn't say I believe the figures...just quoting them from the CDC website.

But thanks for pointing this out; math is not my forte, and I would not have thought to do it.

Here is a cite from FEDERAL CROP INSURANCE CORP. v. A.A. MERRILL 332 U.S. 380(U.S. Supreme Court)

"Anyone entering into an arrangement with the government takes a risk of having accurately ascertained that he who purports to act for the government stays within the bounds of his authority, even though the agent himself may be unaware of the limitations upon his authority. (emphasis added)


Even the Supreme Court says that you are at risk whenever you deal with the government. NO SURPRISE HERE.

Good stats, People. Thanks.

A lot of you have written wonderful letters full of facts to the Bangor Daily News. Does he print them? NO!

Does he print garbage like what is in today's paper? Yes! It just leaves me shaking my head........

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Thanks you for your June 13 editorial about taxing tobacco. We know from research that teen-age smoking goes down when the price of tobacco goes up.

Cigarette smoke now kills about 500,000 Americans annually; more deaths than from alcohol (including drunken driving), cocaine, morphine, heroin, murder, suicides, car accidents, fires and AIDS combined. Alcohol not only is not in the same league as tobacco; it’s not in the same game; it need not even suit up.

I saw a headline last week that 17 people have died of heroin in Maine this year. According to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, 945 Mainers will have died from January to June of this year from tobacco-related illnesses. Now there is a real headline.

Gerald Oleson

Bangor

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Does ANYone know where he got those figures he quosted from "945 Mainers" dying from January till June from Tobacco related illness's?

Now There's a Headline


[This message has been edited by Darlene (edited 06-20-2002).]