When you travel to a country like France, Spain, or South Korea, you notice something about the lifestyles of the professional classes there: Unlike in America, they still smoke cigarettes. The U.S.’s lawyers, professors, and bankers, meanwhile, long ago gave up the devil’s weed.
A Washington Post article that ran last week backed up this observation. The Post notes that, while the nation’s adult smoking rate has fallen to a mere 15 percent, some 40 percent of those with only a GED still merrily puff away. GED-holders are also among the country’s poorest demographics, which means that smoking is increasingly a scourge of the economically deprived.
All of which raises a problem: In recent decades, the U.S. federal government, as well as many states and municipalities, have jacked up cigarette taxes. Indeed, a pack of smokes in cities like Chicago and New York now tops $12. These tax hikes were ostensibly imposed in order to cut smoking rates. Yet, paradoxically, the poorest Americans continue to smoke, while the rich, who can presumably afford the high taxes, have quit the habit. That suggests that demand for cigarettes is quite inelastic among the addicted. That’s to say, they’re going to smoke no matter what price they have to pay. It also indicates that America’s middle and upper classes cut out smoking for reasons quite distinct from the taxes imposed on a pack of smokes. Education and changing social mores probably had more to do with it.
Given the Post article, it seems to me that high cigarettes taxes are in fact cruelly regressive: They don’t lead people to quit and they tend to disproportionately punish the poor. High cigarette taxes are probably healthy for state coffers, but they don’t appear to be making the poorest people in the country any healthier.
