The next time you hear a Democrat pleading to raise your taxes, remember this story.Taxin' Ted freely admits that his support of a federal plan to impose a severe tax on cigarettes will reduce the amount of funding coming in to state coffers. As a bonus, the plan may also effect the price of "securitization" of the tobacco settlements. Taxin' Ted is all about raising your taxes and reducing the amount of revenue coming in to the state. It says so right there in black in white.
Ultimately, this plan to tax tobacco products will create an unfunded mandate. The law will create a new handout for up to 71% of American kids by 2012 but here's the kicker... In order to be able to pay for that, America will need 22.4 million NEW smokers by 2017. Don't take my word for it, the Heritage Foundation has done the grunt work on this one.
So in order for this plan to work, Taxin' Ted and his liberal friends need YOU to start smoking if you haven't already started. And if you have, you need to ignore the warnings from these very same health care professionals, and keep on puffing the death sticks. The Dispatch piece makes this argument:
Studies have shown that for every 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes, there's a 4 percent drop in smoking rates. That means fewer people buying cigarettes, less money for the state and potentially lower profits for tobacco companies.But in the end, Taxin' Ted says that none of that will matter because we'll find a way to tax you to pay for all of this:
"The state may get less revenue, but we'll have more resources for children, and so we'll grow our economy or do whatever we've got to do," he said.Remember, folks, this state just passed a smoking ban and now we're counting on smokers to pay for this baby step towards socialized medicine.
Something else to remember is that when you hear the liberal defenders of this program droning on about The Children (tm), they are now also including in that definition 25-year-olds.
