April Fool--first new tax on the poor

As I noted yesterday, I have little sympathy with smokers, but Obama's new cigarette tax which will impact low-income smokers the most with an average of 13.3% increase and a decrease in state services which depend on those taxes, is really regressive. The SCHIP increase isn't helping those who don't have health insurance, it's pulling most enrollees off the insurance of the working parents' companies, which will cause other insured rates to go up, or companies to fail, so the government (Democrats and clueless RINOs) can further increase SCHIP to include 50 and 60 year olds not yet ready for Medicare. What a plan our great leader has for our low-income families.

This sin tax now is up from $.39 to $1.01 and the cigarette smuggling business is booming. See Brad Schiller article in WSJ. It really is a throw back to the days of FDR, taxing anything that was enjoyable like candy or movies, which hit the unemployed the hardest, and then enroll them in the WPA. Obama's new mandatory "volunteer" act to keep millions from working and on the dole just passed a few days before his April Fool tax--do you suppose they are related?

Also, the duplicity is amazing. Stop smoking programs and drugs have been shown to do nothing, but they are still funded by the government. Even the "quit help lines" which may be private and non-profit, use government grants. Then the researchers get grants to study the drugs, to whine about how the drugs aren't getting to the low-income, and then to do studies on how they don't work anyway. See JAMA, March 11, 2009, "Setting the National Tobacco Control Agenda."

There are now smoking cessation quit lines in every state, but because there are few resources, they can help only 1$ to 2% of smokers quit."

Notice, it's always the money and not the method that fails? And then in the front of that issue you find,

"Emerging evidence suggests the smoking-cessation drug varenicline is among a growing list of medications that might cause serious psychiatric adverse events."

To say nothing of the weight gain problem that often results from the non-smoking programs.