The current anti-smoking campaign is
not about your health ...
It is all about
YOUR MONEY... They want it!
Collectivists have for years been lying to the American
public. The same folks that pointed accusing fingers at Tobacco industry
executives are the same ones who participated in Bill Clinton's illicit antics
in Arkansas and have for years covered up the numerous
criminal activities of Bill Clinton and lied to the
American public about his illegal and immoral activities. Most of those in
influential government posts levying complaints against the tobacco industry
were put there by the Bill Clinton political machine.
What's their Motivation to Lie?
Keep in mind the vast majority of those in Congress are
attorneys with an unspoken affiliation to the same
brotherhood of
attorneys who will be earning billions of dollars in the coming years. It
wouldn't be right for them to spoil the beds they will be sleeping in when they
leave public office.
Raising taxes is nothing new to liberal tax-and-spend Democrats. The
U.S. Congress rejected the settlement with the tobacco industry that was an
attempt to address youth smoking and instead proposed to impose a HALF A
TRILLION dollars in new taxes and to create 17 new bureaucracies to control
another American industry. That effort, too, was defeated in Congress as the
McCain Bill became bloated with extravagant spending that had nothing to do
with smoking.
Sadly, many Republicans who were elected with the
mandate of no new taxes has joined the effort to steal more of your money. They
have been forced to by the successful PR campaign slogan, "Big Tobacco or
Kids?"
Never mind truth! Liberals would have you believe that
anyone opposing their efforts of the government takeover of another American
industry and their welfare state caring for your children is necessarily
supporting youth smoking. How ridiculous, but effective.
Most states have since enacted cigarette-tax increases or
other legislation designed to discourage smoking or lessen people's exposure to
secondhand smoke, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a Washington
lobbying group.
In Alaska smokers pay $1 per pack in taxes. Washington
lifts 82.5 cents from smokers pockets for every pack they buy. In New Jersey
smokers pockets were picked by their legislators when they doubled their tax on
cigarettes. The new 80 cent tax will be used to pay the costs of medical care
for indigent people without medical insurance. Some states (notably California
and Massachusetts) have a special indignity reserved for smokers: They must pay
for their own persecution. In California, an additional 25 cents per pack tax
on cigarettes was passed in 1988 to be used for cancer research, 5%; wetlands,
5%; indigent medical care, 40%; and "education" - read anti-smoker campaign -
50%.
Global cigarette taxes proposed by the New World
Order
"... Price and tax measures are an effective and
important means of reducing tobacco consumption by various segments of the
population, in particular young persons." World Health Organization
Framework Convention on Tobacco Control
Article 6 of the
Framework Convention on
Tobacco Control requires that Parties to the treaty consider tax policies
and price polices as a part of their overall national health policy and
recommends that governments raise tobacco taxes to reduce tobacco consumption.
Currently, the World Health Organization lacks the power to enforce their
proposed global tax on sovereign nations, but you can be sure they will be
striving to change that soon. Perhaps their solution would be to withhold other
important funds to nations that do not comply with the WHO global taxation
plans.
Does higher taxes actually result in a decrease of
tobacco use?
A report from Canada found that higher tobacco taxes there
-- intended to reduce smoking -- have instead helped to fuel an active,
gang-controlled black market in
contraband cigarettes. By
some estimates, counterfeit cigarette factories in China
churn out 400 billion cigarettes annually.
Cigarette taxes hit
low-income people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
nearly one third of Americans earning less than $15,000 per year are smokers,
compared with only 11 percent of those earning more than $50,000 annually.
Since cigarette taxes are fixed and not based on ability to pay, they
necessarily consume a higher percentage of low incomes.
RTI
International released a study recently in which it found that higher cigarette
taxes are financially burdensome on low-income smokers in the United States,
and do not make them more likely to quit. The survey, which looked at
more than 13,000 people living in New York state, found that lower-income
smokers in the state spent nearly a quarter of their household income on
cigarettes compared with an average 2 percent spent by wealthier New York
smokers.
Why do Collectivists really want to raise taxes on
tobacco?
Recovering the Cost of treating smoking-related illnesses
of those on the Medicaid insurance program The national litigation,
which was settled in 1998, sought to recover money that states spent treating
smoking-related illnesses of those on the Medicaid insurance program for the
poor and disabled and to prevent future generations from
smoking.
However, many states used the money for projects unrelated to
tobacco. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia, for example, spent
nothing or less than 2 percent of their settlement funds on prevention
programs. Many others used their windfalls to reduce taxes or for unrelated
programs. National Conference of State Legislatures recently figured that only
8 percent of the money is earmarked for anti-smoking programs. A good portion
is slated for "health care," but much is also going into totally unrelated
programs like roads, schools and teenage boot camps.
How do the states want to spend
the Tobacco Settlement Money?
- Arkansas wants the money to establish health education
centers in the Mississippi Delta, bolster minority health programs, increased
Medicaid coverage for pregnant women, expanded benefits for the elderly, and
eventually extend coverage to everyone who lives at or below the poverty level.
In addition, they want the money to fund medical research for Alzheimer's
disease. [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette , Jan. 22,
2000]
- California wants to spend the money on childhood
development programs, child care, and to fund programs that would allow health
care workers to identify and track children for future services.
[Los Angeles Times , Jan. 20, 2000] An initiative that
would have required the state and counties to spend their share of the national
tobacco settlement entirely on health care was scrapped in favor of the Orange
county supervisors' plan to use most of the windfall to pay off its bankruptcy debt and to add jail beds.
[Orange County Register , Jan. 29, 2000] The city of Los
Angeles wants to use their share of the tobacco money to pay for lawsuits in the Rampart police scandal.
[Los Angeles Times , Feb 20, 2000] In the Bay area, they
plan to spend the money on capital improvements for the Alameda County Medical
Center or renovations for Benicia's police station.
- Colorado has passed legislation to use their share of
the booty to subsidize prescription drug costs and pay for primary care to
at-risk newborns. [Associated Press, Mar. 9, 2000]
- Connecticut wants to fund
education, new roads, and prisons.
- Delaware would like to use their portion of the
settlement to add nine staffers in the Department
of Health and Social Services, fund the state's "pill bill" prescription-
assistance plan, help the un- and underinsured, and buy automatic heart
defibrillators. [The News Journal, Mar. 28, 2000]
- Idaho doesn't plan to spend any of the money, rather
they want to invest the money and spend only the interest. Governor Kempthorne
has said that health advocacy, state building construction and academic
scholarships should be priorities for the money.
- Illinois wants to use the money for
tax relief. [Chicago Tribune,
4/21/2000]
- Indiana will spend the money on a children's health
insurance program and wants to help low income senior citizens pay for
prescription drugs. [Associated Press, 1/28/2000]
- Kansas intends to use all $70 million of this year's
settlement to fund the state budget rather than
health care. [Topeka Capitol Journal, Dec. 30,
1999]
- Maryland proposed tobacco-settlement funds be used for
a teacher pay raise. [SunSpot,
February 27, 2000]
- Minnesota wants to use a large share for
medical student stipends. [Associated Press, Mar. 9, 2000]
- Nevada plans to use their share of the booty to help
low-income senior citizens pay for prescription drugs. [Las
Vegas Sun, Mar. 28, 2000]
- New Jersey wants the money to provide free or
subsidized health care to thousands of low- and moderate-income New Jerseyans
[The Record , Jan. 22, 2000], reimburse hospitals for
treating uninsured patients, provise mental health services in prisons,
programs to care for the elderly, help low-income seniors pay for prescription
drugs, and create a fund to bail out health maintenance
organizations that go under. A whopping 8% of the money would be used on
programs that discourage children from smoking and help others to quit.
[The Record , Jan. 27, 2000]
- Ohio plans to use some of the money to help rebuild or
replace aging Ohio public school buildings. [Cleveland Live,
Oct. 28, 1999]
- Pennsylvania would devote the funds to a number of
important health care-related objectives in Pennsylvania, including an
expansion of health insurance coverage for the
uninsured and disabled, an expansion of smoking cessation and prevention
programs, home and community-based health services, health research, and
uncompensated care relief to hospitals which provide health services to the
uninsured. [PRNewsWire, 1/27/2000]
- Utah suggests using their share for the University of
Utah Health Science Center, for a children's health insurance program and for a
permanent trust fund for public schools.
[The Salt Lake Tribune]
- Virginia's governor is throwing his state's tobacco
settlement money into roads[SunSpot, February 27, 2000].
Notice how they are not
suggesting spending the money on recovering health care costs for
smokers! It's even more rare for them to use the money to reduce
smoking. No, they want to fund the socialist programs, especially
targeting children. These folks recognize that for their socialist programs to
succeed, they need to win over the children.
In my opinion, states spending the money in this fashion
is nothing short of criminal. Why the tobacco companies ever agreed to this
extortion in the first place is beyond me. I find it ironic too, that the folks
who were complaining about all the alleged lying going on by the tobacco
industry, don't seem to have a problem with lying when it benefits them. The
next time someone says something to you about the "lying tobacco companies,"
remind them about the lying Attorney's Generals.
I suppose the other side of this issue of the states not
using the money for what it was intended for is you can pretty well count on
them coming back for more. Once they have discovered the easy money at the
trough, it will be next to impossible to wean them from the public/private
nipple.
A conspiracy of thieves
One curious backlash of states rushing to spend their
tobacco settlement money that is beginning to emerge is a shortfall in the
monies being collected. Apparently states are slated to receive less money from
the tobacco settlement than initially expected due to an expected nationwide
decrease in cigarette shipments. Connecticut, for example, stands to see up to
10 percent less than the $166 million it expected to collect between now and
April, said Marc Ryan, the director of the governor's budget office. The
situation puts some state budget-crunchers in limbo as they plan to spend money
they do not yet have on everything from education and health care to new roads
and prisons.
Price increases,
alternative cigarette
sources, and marketing restrictions have meant an 8.6 percent reduction in
the number of cigarettes sold this year by the leading tobacco companies, the
U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service has estimated.
[Nando Times, Nov. 25, 1999]
As predicted, state governments began looking elsewhere
to make up their shortfalls. Eyeing more that $1 billion a year in taxes not
being collected and paid by Internet retailers, state Attorneys Generals,
citing "a direct threat to public health," concocted a back-room deal with the
U. S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF) and the
nation's major credit card companies to stop processing credit card
transactions with web sites selling cigarettes at deep discounts. Did the
States and credit card companies go after child pornographers and the HUGE
online pornography business? There's no taxes in online smut and therefore no
incentive for them.
I wonder what was the incentive for the credit card
companies to target online cigarette sales? Again... follow the
MONEY.
How about the major bankruptcy law expected to be signed into law
in 2005? Who stands to benefit most from this legislation? Could it be the
credit card companies? These same credit card companies that are eager to jack
up their interest rates to 29 percent or higher on those least able to pay. Can
you see the connection?
In exchange for credit card company cooperation
in curtailing discount cigarette sources, they get more favorable treatment
when it comes to erasing debts under Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
The current propaganda campaign being waged against the
tobacco industry amounts to extortion by the U.S. government,
trial
lawyers, insurance companies, and many others
in the health related professions. They are simply coercing your money from you
through the spreading of fear and in some cases lying to you in exchange for
higher taxes, huge legal fees, higher insurance premiums, and higher medical
fees.
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