Capital Chimes In

Not wanting to be left out, the Capital came forth with their laundry list for a successful session today:

• Fiscal responsibility
• No Slots
• Tepid support for a $1-per-pack increase in the Cigarette tax
• Clean Cars Bill
• Public Service Commission overhaul
• A verifiable paper trail for voting
• Reauthorize Capital Punishment, or at the very least, get rid of it ("But whatever they do, they should act like this state's lawmakers, and not hide behind the judges' robes," they write)
  

A more sensible list than most of what the Sun wrote. But the editorial notices one thing that I have said previously about the cigarette tax: the law of diminishing returns:

Exactly how much pain can the state's hapless smokers take before they quit and the revenue dries up? But if it came down to a choice, we'd rather see the state tax existing bad habits than establish new ones.

Regardless of the Capital's support of a tax-based social engineering project, why are legislators so keen on passing a tax on a product that they want people not to use? If that is the case, than revenues from that tax will do what most tax revenues do when you raise the tax rate; revenues drop. Particularly in the case of cigarette taxes, when the impetus is to tax people so much they stop using the product all together. The really abominable idea regarding the cigarette tax is that while the tax is intended to have diminishing returns as people give up smoking, the General Assembly will then also try to fund new programs using this same revenue; fund a new program using revenue that is intended to dry out.

Their idea of success has a few good ideas, but generally it's more of the same...