So you know all those sky-high taxes our politicians in local government have been levying for years on cigarettes with the excuse that the expense the taxes added to smoking would make some smokers quit?  Well, given how expensive smoking has gotten because of those taxes and given all the smoking bans being passed all over the place people are quitting smoking.  Which, naturally, has those very same politicians peeved.

Why, you ask?  Isn’t less smoking what these people wanted?  Well, maybe not so much given that they’re all now whining about the loss of tax revenue the decline in smoking is causing:

The Minnesota Revenue Department projects tobacco tax collections falling by about 1 percent a year, or $4 million to $5 million. Tax research director Paul Wilson said he couldn’t say how a new statewide smoking ban would affect that projection.

Thirteen states prohibit smoking in bars and restaurants, and Arizona will make it 14 in May. Another six states don’t allow smoking in restaurants, according to the American Lung Association.

California was a leader when it banned smoking in bars and restaurants in 1998. The state also hiked its cigarette tax 50 cents a pack in 1999 to fund health programs.

Tobacco tax revenues boomed, then started to decline. They’ve leveled out at about $1 billion a year in the past few years thanks to aggressive anti-counterfeiting measures, including encrypted cigarette tax stamps, said Anita Gore, a spokeswoman for California Board of Equalization.

“We’re a tax collection agency - we are not predictors of the habits of people,” Gore said. “But if smoking continues to decline, then revenues would continue to decline.”

You can bet that these politicians will be looking to new taxes to replace this lost revenue.  Because it was never really about getting people to quit smoking.  It was about more government control and more government revenue all along.