Stewart: Finance health care with larger sin tax on cigarettes
By Ross Stewart (Contact)
Monday, September 15th, 2008
When people are worried about taxing cigarettes and liquor to help reform something as necessary as the health care system, I get disappointed.
Smokers are the last group of people I’d expect to hear complain about such a thing. All the people I know who smoke hand them out to anyone wanting to bum one. Why all the fuss then?
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius would propose a package of health care reforms that includes a 50-cent tax increase on cigarettes, according to an article in the Lawrence Journal-World.
But there are people against this measure. So I have to ask, how else are we supposed to get money for such a thing?
A sin tax, usually a tax on cigarettes and booze, is supposed to be a tax on a product that harms people and causes damage to society. If we don’t wish to finance health care reforms with a tax increase on cigarettes, I suppose there are plenty of other products that could be considered unnecessary or harmful.
But how much stuff is really unnecessary in life?
Suppose all we need to survive is shelter, food, water and clothing. Why don’t we put a sin tax on all things that are for vain hedonistic purposes?
Big screen TV tax. Car tax. Gold watch tax. Big fluffy pillow tax. Wii tax. Desert tax (after all, it isn't a meal). Wet wipe tax.
Think about how much surplus revenue the state could receive every year from such a wide stance on the definition as to what qualifies as taxable under the sin tax.
Consumer culture is as bad for you as cigarettes or booze. Look at how many people have credit card debt. For most people, this debt isn’t from medical expenses or a family emergency. People just want to live outside their means and consume, consume, consume — buy, buy, buy.
We have two options to solve this problem. Either we should tax everything under the sin tax that isn't food, water, shelter or clothing, or we should just raise the tax on a pack of cigarettes.
If we don’t raise the sin tax on cigarettes, how else are we supposed to help reform health care in Kansas — only one of 10 states that has an increasing number of people who don’t have health care.
Just tax the cigarettes and get children and the uninsured some health care.
Stewart is a Wichita senior in journalism.
Discussion
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We only have two options? Wow, I would have thought maybe some non-hyperbolic middle ground could have been reached.
I liked the direction you were going with this, until the 8th paragraph, where I cringed at your misuse of "desert" in place of "dessert". (As tasty as dry land does sound...)
Funny -- I just wrote a column for our Collegian *yesterday* about my frustrations of misusage of homonyms, such as "our" and "are", "they're," "their" and "there," and I must say, I'm quite disappointed that a journalism major just made that error.
From then on, my opinion of your column went downhill.
And I agree with empirelucas, there has got to be a happy medium somewhere.
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