Proposition 29: Pros
By Kymberly Bays | 05/04/2012 | California | 4 CommentsProponents/Funders of Proposition 29: American Cancer Society, the Lance Armstrong Foundation
- According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking costs Californian taxpayers $9 billion a year in health care costs and productivity.
- “By adding $1 tax per pack of cigarettes and equivalent tax on other tobacco products, Prop 29 will save an estimated 104,500 lives from premature smoking-caused deaths, prevent 228,700 children from becoming adult smokers and save Californian taxpayers an estimated $5.1 billion in long-term health costs from declines in smoking,” says nurse Hollye Harrington Jacobs in the Huffington Post.
- Proposition 29 will establish an annual audit of the new California Cancer Research Life Sciences Innovation Trust Fund, which behave similarly to a previous stem-cell research initiative approved by Californians years ago.
- California currently has one of the lowest cigarette taxes in the country. Presently, the state tax is 87 cents. New York state’s cigarette tax is $4.35 per pack, in comparison.
- National average cigarette tax is $1.46, California’s 87 cents per pack is well below this figure.
- Of the 3.6 million U.S. teenagers who smoke, more than 400,000 of them reside in California.
- Jenny Cook, past president of the American Cancer Society and co-chairwoman of the Smoke-Free Coalition of Marin County, told Marinscope Newspapers: “The California Cancer Research Act will help save lives by providing nearly $600 million a year for cancer, heart disease, stroke, emphysema and other smoke-related research. CCRA will also drive down smoking rates by investing $179 million per year into proven tobacco control efforts such as prevention, cessation and enforcement by the initiative to raise the state’s tobacco tax by $1 per pack.”
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4 Comments
PJ
05.21.2012
Taxes being used for social engineering is a rotten idea. First of all, you have no proof that any of the money spent will save lives, because all research stats can be skewed, depending on who is reading them. Second, the long term health costs of smokers is actually equivalent to non-smokers in that smokers die earlier and others may require extended very expensive nursing home care. Third, California is in an even worse economic state than Illinois. It can’t pay its current bills, so why are you adding another bureaucracy?
There is no accountability for this new bureaucracy other than fiscal. Who is to say when it has accomplished its goal and should be ended?
If you get more smokers to quit solely for financial reasons, won’t funding for this program be depleted? How will you justify raising taxes again?
Randall Jones
05.25.2012
This is a ludicrous proposition that will only lead to black market sales and smuggling of cigarettes. All people die at some point, and there are costs associated with those deaths. There are more deaths caused by obesity than by smoking. The idea of taxing fast food or trying to police the way people eat to prevent them from getting heart disease or diabetes which are both on the rise from poor eating habits and poor nutrition is just as ridiculous. The NIH is well funded and the state does not need to try and replicate it’s work by establishing another beuracracy that will undoubtly grow to unmanageable proportions is not what we need. It doesn’t matter what the tax rate for cigarettes are in other states, this is not a competition to see who can come up with the largest sin tax. In the end, how much of the tax money generated is going to support the over inflated salaries of the beuracrats and employees necessary to run this new committee? I would also ask if anyone remembers the lottery? Designated funds for our schools to help them out, set aside from the lottery funds? Ask the school systems how that worked out and how long it took the state to figure out how to get there hands on that money by lowering budgets to school districts? How long before these funds are diverted to the states coffers for other use? You know that when the politicians get desperate they will figure out a way. Vote no on this proposition. It’s just another way to punish people who use legal tobacco products!
Dan Richards
06.03.2012
@danrich
Of all the reports, only the anti-smoking based research has been able to prove that smoking is as bad as they say. What used to be independent research always came up with an inconclusive report, but now if studies cannot return a negative finding, they have to pay back all funding, thus contaminating the studies.
The whole of the anti-smoking issue has been a money maker, with to many other issues of more valid research being ignored; like the cancer causing issues of many of the food additives used in the past 60 years (which correlates more strongly with the increased levels of cancer than smoking does. This is by no means to say smoking is good for you, but facts as they lay, there are much more smokers outliving non-smokers than the other way around. And a report from the 1980′s showed that filter cigarets had a higher level of cancer than non-filtered, which caused the change from the 60-70′s change to fiberglass filters to a cotton-fiberglass mix.Used to be a cotton filter was more common as an industry standard, but there was a change to fiberglass in the 60-70′s.
I believe it will be used as usual, to line pockets, more than fund any research. Which is the more common use of the Cigaret taxes today and has been from the start of this. Would love to see more studies on the food additives, as I believe a lot higher cancer level finding will be found there over any from smoking.
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