Feb 17 2007
Treasuries up in Smoke
In the 1980’s, the BBC first aired a memorably episode of Yes, Prime Minister where the British Prime Minister, the right honorable James T. Hacker, attempted to manipulate his permanent secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby, into accepting his tax cuts by threatening him with a heavy increase in taxation of tobacco.
The episode was titled “The Smoke Screen“. One of the brilliant things about this show was that it illuminated the mundane, inane and complex inner workings of government and presented all of it in a humorous way. In this one episode in particular, in the constant war between the Civil Service and their political masters, Sir Humphrey refused the tax cut on principle, since, “traditionally, taxes aren’t raised by measuring the government’s financial needs, but by levying as much as it can before deciding what to spend it on.”
As a leverage on his proposed tax cuts, Hacker threatened to accept the anti-smoking lobby’s proposals to ban all tobacco advertisements and dramatically increase the taxes on tobacco. While acknowledging that the Treasury would dismiss the proposal out of hand, since the revenue from tobacco taxes are about £4 billion a year, he nevertheless made Sir Humphrey believe he’s going forward with the proposal.
Sir Humphrey counter-reasoned as follows (Wikipedia):
If those who die of smoking were to live to an advanced age, then it has been proven that they would cost the Treasury more in terms of pensions and benefit payments than it currently pays out in medical expenses. So in financial terms, he argues, it makes sense that they “continue to die at about the present rate.”
For the audience watching the show in 1986, all this talk was a moot point. Everyone knew that if you went after the tobacco interests, you were committing political suicide. Neither the government nor the people wanted to stop smoking. To do so was to halt the flow of billions of pounds (or dollars).
You can opt for short term increases in revenue by taxing smokers into oblivions until they stop puffing away, or you can let smokers continue to smoke and collect the revenue.
As we sit here in 2007 and with events playing out in reality remarkably like the proposals in this show, it seems the government never made a clear choice between the two options above. Our government crusaded against the “immortality of smoking” (the argument’s dubious at best) while fully expecting to receive large revenues from smokers.
The argument declaring the “immorality of smoking” is so trite as to be embarrassing.
“You are killing yourself,” they declared, even as many people douse their innards with poison every chance they get (it’s called alcohol).
“You’re killing others with second-hand smoke,” even if standing behind a car with the engine running is many times worse, and if the welfare of others is really your concern, then perhaps you should drive the speed limit and stop “aborting” babies.
“You’re making the tax payers pay for you when you get cancer and die!” even as people consume unhealthy amounts of sugar, making them a diabetic down the line; even as people dosy-do with many sexual partners heedless of the STD’s floating about— if we live long enough, there’s a cozy tax-paid hospital bed waiting for us all, that is unless you’re affluent or dirt poor.
So, I think the honest reason for imploring people to quit smoking is that doing so would make them feel better physically over the long haul (I quit just last year for this reason.). And the other honest reason for wanting people to quit is that anti-smokers hate the way it smells. Most arguments beyond this are people wanting to vent they bigotries on others, since neither race, sex nor sexual orientation is popular anymore as acceptable reasons for bashing someone.
Yahoo News reported this week that states have twisted themselves into a bind regarding their anti-smoking laws.
On the one hand state governments are pressured to outlaw smoking in everything but name by anti-smoking lobbies, other other hand state governments are being squeezed financially by the steady decrease in revenue by people quitting. Minnesota expects a drop of 1 percent in revenue a year, roughly $4-5 million a year– “and that is does not even take into account the potential effect of a statewide smoking ban.”
According to Yahoo News, “in 2005, tobacco taxes contributed $13 billion to state budgets,” and this doesn’t take into account the federal taxes levied.
Now as the gravy train starts to dry up for state and federal governments vis-a-vis tobacco, I have long speculated with friends what would be the next target, what else are they going to taxed into blithering submission? From recent legislation in New York regarding trans-fats, it increasingly looks like greasy foods are next on the menu.
This debased depravity in reasoning that allows people to indulge their intolerances against socially unacceptable behaviors such as smoking and eating MacDonald’s makes me wonder: Who’s on next? Who will the collective next turn against?
Or as Sir Humphrey Appleby said:
Sir Humphrey: Notwithstanding the fact that your proposal could conceivably encompass certain concomitant benefits of a marginal and peripheral relevance, there is a countervailing consideration of infinitely superior magnitude involving your personal complicity and corroborative malfeasance, with a consequence that the taint and stigma of your former associations and diversions could irredeemably and irretrievably invalidate your position and culminate in public revelations and recriminations of a profoundly embarrassing and ultimately indefensible character.
Hacker: Perhaps I can have a précis of that.
Sir Humphrey: There’s nicotine on your hands.
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