California Proposition 29
Proposition 29 would increase the tax on cigarettes by $1 per pack, up from $0.87 to $1.87. The price of a pack of cigarettes is listed here as $5.19 in 2011, so this would increase the cost by a little less than 20%. The revenue will be devoted mainly to cancer and other smoking-related disease research. It is vacuously true, as the ads and flyers the opposition send out say, that the revenue will not be devoted to cancer treatment.
The tax is obviously regressive, and some make the argument that it will not even help the people who are paying for it. But if you believe in the efficacy of cancer research then of course people who smoke, who are more likely to get the diseases the research is targeting than those who don't would ultimately reap some benefit. Also, I believe there are measurable effects between price and smoking rates; some people who would otherwise have taken up smoking would therefore benefit (and some money is directed at smoking prevention).
I will say at this point that it is not obvious to me whether having the revenue be directed to cancer research is better than simply directing it into the state's General Fund, which is -- yet again -- experiencing a huge deficit which will surely mean cuts in social services such as health care and related programs.
The tax is also a spiked increase. I think it would have been both better and more attractive to phase it in, say, $0.33 at a time over three years. And it would have been better if it were to be indexed to inflation. (Taxes on cigarettes have not been raised by California for a long time (1994 comes to mind as what I read, so the tax on cigarettes in California, just like the non-sales-tax tax on gasoline, has in real dollars gone significantly over the years). Interestingly, they tried to raise the tax by $2.60 a pack (!) in 2006, and that was only narrowly defeated.
Raising the tax by $1.00 will not put California into the ranks of those states which have the highest prices for cigarettes -- not even close, according to the table I referenced.
All in all, as with Proposition 28, I again find myself unenthusiastically in support.
The tax is obviously regressive, and some make the argument that it will not even help the people who are paying for it. But if you believe in the efficacy of cancer research then of course people who smoke, who are more likely to get the diseases the research is targeting than those who don't would ultimately reap some benefit. Also, I believe there are measurable effects between price and smoking rates; some people who would otherwise have taken up smoking would therefore benefit (and some money is directed at smoking prevention).
I will say at this point that it is not obvious to me whether having the revenue be directed to cancer research is better than simply directing it into the state's General Fund, which is -- yet again -- experiencing a huge deficit which will surely mean cuts in social services such as health care and related programs.
The tax is also a spiked increase. I think it would have been both better and more attractive to phase it in, say, $0.33 at a time over three years. And it would have been better if it were to be indexed to inflation. (Taxes on cigarettes have not been raised by California for a long time (1994 comes to mind as what I read, so the tax on cigarettes in California, just like the non-sales-tax tax on gasoline, has in real dollars gone significantly over the years). Interestingly, they tried to raise the tax by $2.60 a pack (!) in 2006, and that was only narrowly defeated.
Raising the tax by $1.00 will not put California into the ranks of those states which have the highest prices for cigarettes -- not even close, according to the table I referenced.
All in all, as with Proposition 28, I again find myself unenthusiastically in support.