Say Anything Blog

It’s fitting, given the ethical problems his administration is already having, that the first law Obama would sign into existence as the President of this country would be a shameful fraud like the CHIP entitlement expansion.  That bill funds a massive expansion of government-provided health care with a draconian increase in tobacco taxes that may soon have New Yorkers, as an example, paying as much as $10/pack for cigarettes.

NEW YORK, Feb. 8 (UPI)—The fact that a pack of cigarettes will soon cost more than $10 in New York could push some people quit smoking, a health official says.

Michael Seilback, a member of the American Lung Association of the state of New York, said if the new 62-cent federal tax added to a single pack of cigarettes encourages smokers to quit, it could potentially lower smoking-related healthcare costs and deaths, the New York Post reported Sunday.

The federal tax will be applied to all cigarette sales in New York following the recent passage of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program law.

While the idea of smokers quitting their habit may seem like a good thing to some (I maintain that using the tax code to manipulate the behavior of citizens has no place in a free society), what’s problematic is that if people quit smoking tobacco taxes are never going to fund the CHIP expansion.

Which the liberals knew, of course.  That’s why the CHIP bill is such a fraud.  Anybody with common sense knew that taxing tobacco use into extinction is not a sustainable way to fund government-provided health care.  The taxes are too high, and the tax base is too small.  But the liberals did it anyway, because the point wasn’t ever to have tobacco users fund the bill inevitably.  The point was just to get the foot of government health care expansion in the door.

Once they had the CHIP expansion in place they knew full well that it would never go away, even if tax revenues from tobacco users did.  So while we Americans were sold on the idea of getting government-provided health care at the expense of a not-so-sympathetic demographic like smokers the reality is that we’re all going to end up paying for CHIP as soon as the smokers finally give up their freedom to smoke in the face of blatant economic prohibition.

It was a bait-and-switch from the get-go.

Anyone who thinks they can get free stuff from the government should be disabused of that notion by this example.  There is no such thing as a free lunch.  We all pay, ultimately, for everything we get.