COLUMN: The certainty of death and taxes

From Cila Warncke's, "Bigmouth Strikes Again," Fall '00 From Cila Warncke's, "Bigmouth Strikes Again," Fall '00Last week, Britain took a page out of America's budget book and raised the price on cigarettes by 30 pence (about 48 cents) a pack. A trip to the corner store is now a bit nostalgic for me, recalling last spring in the States when cigarettes became even more expensive due to a new tax.From Cila Warncke's, "Bigmouth Strikes Again," Fall '00Last week, Britain took a page out of America's budget book and raised the price on cigarettes by 30 pence (about 48 cents) a pack. A trip to the corner store is now a bit nostalgic for me, recalling last spring in the States when cigarettes became even more expensive due to a new tax. The rationale, on both sides of the Atlantic, is that smokers -- the popular bane of a healthful society -- deserve to pay a lot of money for the privilege of killing themselves slowly. After all, the high incidences of lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema among smokers cost the public a massive amount in health care dollars. Moreover, smokers pollute the air for the (more enlightened) non-smokers, litter the streets with nasty cigarette butts and generally lower the quality of life for those around them. But before rolling your eyes in disgust and saying "but people choose to smoke so it's their own fault," stop and think about it for a minute. Imagine that, instead of cigarettes, the government and media decided to launch an all-out campaign against cheeseburgers. Heart disease is one of the leading causes of death in the U.S. and responsible for enormous amounts of money spent on health care, so why not? There would be adverts warning about the dangers of cheeseburgers. Executives of the leading fast-food chains would have to go to court to try to justify marketing this deadly product. And the government could start slapping huge taxes on the greasy little sandwiches, just to help offset the cost of hospital care. But, you say, it's not the same thing, cheeseburgers don't harm anyone except the people eating them, they don't pollute the air and give children asthma. So, for another example, take cars -- specifically the massive, gas-guzzling trucks of which Americans are so unreasonably fond. They pollute the environment, yet you don't see huge billboards warning about the evils of the minivan. The ludicrous tax on cigarettes amounts to severe economic discrimination -- even a class-related bias. Since smoking is seen as so socially unacceptable, you often find -- at least in the States -- that white-collar professionals are less likely to smoke than their working-class counterparts. As anyone who has ever worked in a nice restaurant will tell you, most of the waiters and bus-persons are probably smokers -- and the manager probably isn't. In effect, the government is levying taxes against precisely the people who can least afford it, placing yet another burden on the already-poorly treated working class. Again, the argument arises -- people can always choose to not smoke. This is true, but an insufficient justification for the unreasonable attitude of society toward smokers. People choose to have unsafe sex, to eat unhealthful food, to neglect exercise and to drink themselves into a stupor, yet none of those damaging habits come in for nearly the amount of derision that smoking does. What it boils down to is that smokers are an easy target. And while the government purports to be looking after the welfare of society, it is merely sucking the maximum profit out from a vulnerable sector of the population. People quitting smoking would be the worst thing in the world for the United States economy. The government doesn't want people to give up smoking -- they want people to carry on and pay for it.