For every group of teenagers who turn 18, President Obama’s 2009 cigarette tax will spare up to 70,000 of them from premature death, a White House economic adviser said Tuesday.
Jason Furman, the chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, made the claim Tuesday in a speech delivered to a World Bank conference.
The 62 cent-per-pack tax hike that Obama signed into law in 2009 to pay for an expansion of children’s healthcare discourages people from smoking and saves lives, Furman argued.
He relied on evidence from outside studies suggesting that the increase in price due to the tax reduced the number of smokers among 18 year olds in a given year by 45,000 to 220,000.
Given that about one-third of youth smokers die prematurely because of their use of tobacco, Furman concluded, 15,000 to 70,000 are spared because of the tax.
Obama’s budget proposal to again raise the federal cigarette tax, from $1.01 to $1.95, to pay for an expansion of early childhood education would save another 10,000 to 50,000, by those calculations.
Poor people, who are more likely to smoke, were the biggest beneficiaries from the tax in terms of longevity, by Furman’s analysis.
But the tax’s effectiveness was blunted by the fact that smokers could switch from cigarettes or small cigars to pipe tobacco or big cigars, Furman noted. After the 2009 tax hike, there was a sharp movement among smokers away from roll-your-own cigarettes to pipe tobacco, while many cigar makers added mass to small cigars to have them reclassified as large to avoid the tax.
When the tax was introduced, some conservatives said that it represented a breach of Obama’s campaign trail promise not to raise taxes on middle-class households.
