Buy Cigarettes for the Kids (edited title)

Townhall.com::Buy Cigarettes for the Kids::By Jacob Sullum


Politically, making smokers pay for children's health insurance is a great idea: Everybody loves children, and everybody hates smokers. But once you get beyond the popularity contest, it's clear that financing an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) with a big increase in the federal cigarette tax is neither fair nor wise.

As a group, smokers are less affluent than nonsmokers, and a poor person's spending on cigarettes represents a much bigger chunk of his or her income than a rich person's. These facts combine to make cigarette taxes highly regressive.

According to a Tax Foundation analysis, the Senate proposal to pay for a $35-billion SCHIP expansion by raising the federal cigarette tax from 39 cents to $1 a pack is the "least defensible alternative" because "no other federal tax hurts the poor more than the cigarette tax." The foundation's Gerald Prante calculates that "the burden of the proposed cigarette tax hike on the lowest-earning 20 percent of households is 37 times heavier than it would be if the government raised the money with the federal income tax."