Some 15 Utah health organizations are lobbying for a cigarette tax raise from 70 cents a pack to a cool $2, with the double-edged ambition of striking a blow to cigarette use and also raising funds to the order of $48.7 million to help alleviate health care costs.
The American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, Huntsman Global Campaign and a dozen other groups think this is a sound and intelligent plan. Smoking does a lot of damage and causes a lot of otherwise unnecessary health care costs8212;it seems logical to prevent smokers from harming themselves, and at least make a down payment on future medical expenses.
What’s more, smoking is gross. It’s a disgusting, awful habit by almost any standard, and something that we should stamp out. It leads to all sorts of problems. Everyone knows it, and has known it for more than 50 years. Cigarettes kill, and so does secondhand smoke, as our tax dollars told us via televised public service announcements when we were all children.
In our crusade to better public health, we probably should remember greasy foods lead to a lot of unnecessary health problems, least of all the obesity epidemic bearing down on the country. According to the Conference Group, a nonprofit business management research company, $45 billion is spent annually because of obesity, resulting in a 36 percent raise in health care costs over the past year, more than caused by smoking. Seems like a pretty big problem. We should increase taxes on unhealthy foods to discourage their use too. People might like McDonald’s, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth, leading to heart disease and stroke. Let them eat broccoli.
And since secondhand smoke is so dangerous, we ought to crack down on car exhaust also, which contains carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, formaldehyde and a bunch of other lovelies frequently found in8212;you guessed it8212;cigarette smoke. Students on campus are forced to sit at intersections every day waiting for the light to turn, and during that time are exposed to carcinogens. Studies cited by the American Lung Association show air pollution leads to 60,000 premature deaths a year in this country, and anyone who has seen Salt Lake City’s charming winter smog blanket can’t doubt it. A tax should be levied to deal with the harmful consequences of automobile use.
While we’re at it, cars are pretty dangerous, what with all the accidents, so let’s increase taxes on those as well. According to data compiled by the National Vital Statistics Report, odds are if you die tomorrow and are between the ages of 15 and 34, your death will involve a car, a fact that never fully escapes me every time I start up my own, and all this costs us is a paltry $164.2 billion, or an average of $1,051 a person per year, according to the American Automobile Association. So increase car taxes, too, and spend the proceeds on public education on why we shouldn’t get in car accidents.
Of course, no such taxes could ever be proposed. We’d throw the bums legislating it out of Congress overnight. We’d stop eating ourselves to death and we’d stop driving cars if whatever benefits we got from them didn’t outweigh the rather obvious costs.
And we’d stop smoking too. Quitting is hard, but it’s not impossible. We don’t need the state telling us to be responsible when everyone already knows they should be. Let the people make the choice on their own8212;eat less or suffer the consequences, drive more carefully or have an accident, quit smoking or get lung cancer. We ought to remember that policy-makers aren’t the only ones with decision-making capabilities.
Kevin Merriman
Aaron Shaddy