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· Cross-Border/Crime
· Letter
· Terrorism
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Jump to full article: The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, 2008-05-12
Intro: I'm looking at the photo accompanying Patrick Fleenor's May 7 op-ed, "Cigarette Taxes Are Fueling Organized Crime," and thinking, "Look at all that revenue going up in smoke."
Maybe the government should go retail and sell what it has confiscated -- after all, cigarettes are legal.
Patrick Fleenor turns logic on its head by arguing that high tobacco taxes do more harm than good. The fact that criminals have learned to make money by smuggling cigarettes from low-tax states to high-tax states does not mean that we should, therefore, eliminate tobacco taxes.
While Mr. Fleenor calls high tobacco taxes bad public policy, tell that to the citizens of New York City, where less than 9% of youths smoke compared to 23% nationally. If we were to eliminate high tobacco taxes, we would be giving up the most effective tool in our arsenal -- higher prices -- in battling the nation's leading cause of preventable death. . . .
Eliminating tobacco taxes will not eliminate the existence of organized crime nor the threat of terrorism -- nefarious groups will simply find other ways to replace lost funds, just as they always have. Eliminating tobacco taxes however, would lead to more people smoking, resulting in higher rates of death and disease as well as increased health-care spending. Rather than scale back our efforts to fight the nation's number one public health problem, we should intensify our efforts and use those strategies that we know work.
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