jamesdeluxe":pwievyex said:
Admin, you can't be serious. You're making this a class issue?
I'd feel this way even if I didn't smoke. The bottom like is that smokers are in a small minority, and the activity is unpopular with the majority who don't smoke. It's an easy way for the majority to try to balance the budget on the backs of the minority and feel all smug and good about themselves for doing so. And very little of that revenue is going to pay healthcare expenses for the diseases those addicted to the things are going to eventually have -- most of that will come out of federally-funded Medicare because they'll be over 65 when the disease manifests itself.
And yes, it's a class issue, too, for the fact of the matter is that the upper crust by and large aren't the smoking population. If they were, or if smokers were in a majority, you'd see a lot more resistance to the tax hike. Try boosting the tax on a six-pack, or on a bottle of wine or whiskey, and listen to the outcry that will follow. Yet alcohol is responsible for a lot of society's social and medical ills, too -- liver cancer, drunk driving, ancillary violence, etc. Therefore the point of increasing the tax is
not to pay to remedy social ills, despite whatever proponents might say. It sounds good, but it's merely a red herring to mask the real issue.
Like Tony, I also question the positive effect that the tax is supposed to have on net tax revenue. I suspect that those in border areas will buy out of state, and the smart ones in the state's interior areas will use mail order. The majority of the state's population lives in the tri-state area where it's easy for a shopkeeper to drive across the border into Connecticut or New Jersey, load up a minivan with smokes from Costco and drive them back to their mini-mart in Queens, therefore bypassing the tax and increasing their profit margin because they'll still be selling the pack for the prevailing $11 while pocketing what would be the tax. As a case study, when Quebec markedly increased tobacco taxes a smuggling operation across the St. Lawrence from New York to Ontario began to flourish. Net tax revenue on cigarettes actually went
down, the black market was so prevalent. In the end Quebec actually
reduced tobacco taxes again, the black market dried up and tobacco tax revenue actually increased. It's even easier to do in New York where the geographic hurdles facing the black market in Quebec don't exist.
The state is very much in risk of going bankrupt because of a prevailing tax-and-spend philosophy that's been in place for decades, much like California. The difference is that California is a very appealing place to live. New York doesn't have that going for it, and folks have been emigrating out of New York for many years because they just can't take the taxation anymore. Compare, for example, both property and income taxes to nearly anywhere else in the U.S. I know, I used to pay both. People and businesses have been moving out of New York State in droves. Taxes played a large part in my decision to leave.
What New York needs is a two-fold process: fiscal restraint, and a broad-based program to develop business incentives that will promote business development within the state to increase net tax revenue without increasing (or better yet, decreasing) marginal tax rates across the board. Using smokers as a scapegoat is not the answer.
