I agree that there should not be an increase on cigarettes. This is just another way of telling us what we can and cannot do. They say it is to help pay down medicaid bills…hmmm Why don’t they tax the lottery or alcohol or casinos more. Why do people who receive food stamps not only get their food free, but they do not get charged tax. Maybe they should go about it in such a way as….”Hike on cigarettes to support education of Medicaid / welfare receipants!!”

Thank goodness that this did not pass, otherwise Illinois folk would stream across the border to Missouri and give us their foolish money.

It sounds that it is going forward. What a shame. I do not and have never smoked, but I don’t believe that this is the way to go. Because I see the increases in alcohol (I like my beer), fast foods, and whatever. That’s how it is going to pan out. Tax the smoker. They die or quit. Uh-oh, now we need to find someone else to tax. Wrong answer. Everyone needs to fight all of these taxes, because if you don’t, eventually they will end up at your doorstep. If you love taxes and want to donate more now, please do so. Believe me, they will not send your check back.

I put a difference between taxing tobacco and taxing liquor/beer/wine, fast foods and so-on.

I’m not saying the same people who do one will not then turn to the other later when, as pointed out, the smokers do what smokers do and the revenues from that
source dry up.

I’m just saying I’d chuse to fight that battle when they take it to things which are actually nourishment and normal/natural to seek out–even bears and other animals will come and get drunk where a car load of grain ferments alongside a wilderness rail line. They run the hell away from smoke and fire though.

A further distinction is that I’m old enough to remember when these nicotine fiends thought nothing of stinking your clothes up with their nasty-smelling tobacco smoke. They were just plain rude about it and you were asking for a fight if you said anything.

So I take pleasure in seeing smokers punished for it. I know them for what they are when they’re in the majority or even a waning plurality.

If they don’t like it let them send off for some seeds from a mail-order seed place and grow their own tobacco and smoke that, or grow some rank weed related to tobacco which also contains their deadly-poison alkaloid addiction.

I don’t have a lot of use for beer wine and liquor either, but when people use those, if they stay out of their car, they’re not bothering me. Some people even have their personality somewhat improved by it, and also it got people through a period in this nation’s history when the only safe thing to drink was something which had been brewed–which means heat sterilized. The typical water supplies were all polluted with something–anything from drainage from graveyards to beaver fever. Anyway, don’t alcoholic beverages already have considerable “sin” tax on them already? They ought to reduce the tax on those in Illinois by what the increase in swag is from the nicotine fixers.

A little temperate drinking can even be said to be beneficial.

All civilization probably owes boozing a debt for agriculture is said to be a result of the desire to have a steady supply of raw feedstocks for production of beers and ales.

I’d draw my “line in the sand” at massive increases in taxes on alcoholic beverages. I don’t care what they do to the tobacco industry. They were caught red-handed knowingly producing a product that’s addictive and deleterious to health while publicly promoting it as benign.

Yep, when you increase prices outrageously, it forces people to run out and buy more of it!!! That’s the way to solve a budget crisis! Who thinks this actually works??? And when are newspapers going to report AFTER THE FACT that the revenues actually declined when the price and/or tax went up?? America gets dumber by the day.

Most Americans agree that “prohibition” doesn’t work. So how much does something have to cost before it’s the equivalent of prohibition?

Yes, let’s keep raising those taxes to pay for something you say we all need … because after all — when people stop smoking, there will be no more revenue to pay for you entitlement program, and the money will then have to come from general revenue.

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