Jump to full article: Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger, 2009-06-21
Author: Sid Salter
Intro: discussions of another cigarette tax hike this year - this time just on the tobacco manufacturing companies or "non-participating manufacturers," or NPMs, that weren't a party to the state's tobacco settlement - should come with a giant asterisk.
No one can explain that fact better than Brian Perry of Capstone Public Affairs, which represents Altria but does not lobby for it. Perry wrote in a recent blog entry the truth about this new tax on the NPMs. What's the truth? The truth is that this tax on the NPMs isn't about solving the state's revenue problems and it's not particularly about forcing cigarette makers to bear a portion of the state's public health care burden, either.
It's about market share. It's about making it more expensive for "cheap" cigarette companies (Little Tobacco) to compete with Altria and the other "Big Tobacco" companies who settled Mississippi's tobacco lawsuit in the 1990s. . . .
But if the state taxes NPMs for a portion of the state's public health care burden for paying to treat smoking-related illnesses for the poor - and it should levy that tax - lawmakers and Gov. Haley Barbour, who once represented the company that eventually became Altria (Philip Morris), should at least call that new NPM tax what it is - a political sop to Big Tobacco.
Altria didn't pay to advertise on behalf of taxing the NPMs because its executives are, well, altruistic.
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