Steven L. Goldstein, The Sun Sentinel

Steven L. Goldstein
The Sun Sentinel
200 East Las Olas Boulevard
Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33301

RE: “Cut Through the Smoke and Raise Tobacco Tax” – The bottom line modern American Liberal answer to every problem up to and including merdes from Quebec, teen age obesity, Governor Blago, Mrs. Schlossberg and doesn’t she make Sarah Palin look like the head of Mensa, Global Warming, Global Cooling, and low FCAT scores is, perforce, raising taxes. Today, in the Sun Sentinel, you may have gone a step too far.

My dear Professor,

It’s good to see that some things never change.

Your low key Jeremiad this morning about heartless, gun toting, snake handling, gay bashing Republicans who hate poor people and do nothing for the children is, alas, typical.

Your premise is based on disavowing Logic.

If, as you say, smoking is evil, pernicious, and fatal to both the smoker and the people of Florida because of the increased Medicaid costs, would it not be a Logical imperative to ban all tobacco products in Florida?

Modern American Liberals like to ban things. Alcohol, DDT, Phisohex, and Free Speech leap to mind.

We can learn from the failure of the ban on alcohol. We learned from our failures in farm subsidies, didn’t we? We learned from the early failures in the War on Poverty, didn’t we?

Your solution to the tobacco problem, tax the bejeezuz out of the end user, still permits smoking in Florida.

The best thing to be done, the only Logical thing to be done, is to ban tobacco in all its forms in Florida.

That you want to discourage it but still permit inhaling is akin to being a German who sat around, hands in his lap, during the Holocaust. When it was over, when Patton surged through Bavaria, he said “Who knew? If only someone had told me.”

I am telling you.

Smoking kills. There can be no half way measures in fighting it.

[As an aside, and let’s keep this just between us, you are saying that raising taxes will discourage people from engaging in certain activities. I assume that cutting taxes would encourage certain activities. You are getting close to a “supply side” solution. It is one contrary to President Bambi’s take on “fairness” and the tax code. I guess there is no sense in being a modern American Liberal unless you like going through life squaring circles.]

You seem to be saying that raising the tobacco tax, while acquiescing in the death of countless Floridians – so close to Christmas and Scrooge saying something about “decreasing the surplus population”, remember? – will give us the money to fund needed social programs. Things like “midnight basketball”, 4th & 5th trimester abortions, manatee suffrage, and the old reliable, anything that can be labeled “for the children”.

Perhaps it is time to redo Florida’s tax laws.

An income tax is expressly forbidden by Florida’s Constitution.

May I suggest that, since you speak for the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party, we encourage all Democratic candidates for any office to come out of the closet? “Are you in favor of repealing the Constitutional ban on income taxes”? The follow up question, one that is forced upon us by Logic, is “Are you in favor of an income tax”?

Modern American Liberals favor “choice”, don’t they? Modern American Liberals favor “change”, don’t they? Bam! A double header, no?



PS – As the original multiculturalist Nobel Prize winning poet said, “A woman’s a woman but a good cigar is a smoke”. Leave it to President Handsome Billy from Hot Springs to combine them.