Michael Mayo, The Sun Sentinel

March 15, 2009

Michael Mayo
The Sun Sentinel
200 East Las Olas Boulevard
Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33301

RE: The moral hazard of raising cigarette taxes or maybe the petard you find yourself hoisted upon is of your own making. As reported by you in this morning’s Sun-Sentinel.

Mr. Mayo,

Do you remember the Delaney Amendment?

Delaney was a Congressman from Brooklyn – Don’t be silly. Of course he was a Democrat – who put an earmark into a bill before they were known as that. It said that if any product contained carcinogenic material it would be banned. Not taxed higher than before, not restricted, banned.

The side story is that Delaney, in the words of Hinnisy the publican, “seen his opportunities and took’em”. He founded the first au naturel organic vitamin and health food company. This was in a time when the only time the word organic was used was in advanced high school chemistry. [If you want to get some strange looks stand under the organic produce sign at Publix and ask where the inorganic celery is. Specify long strand polymers if in season.]

From the time it was passed the detection capacity of electron microscopes went from one part in 10,000 to one part in 1,000,000 to part in 100,000,000 to one part in an Obama stimulus package. Still, Delaney and his surrogates defended his amendment like Horatius at the bridge.

My memory is dim. Did it just enrich the Delaney cabal or did it cure cancer?

It’s been 25 years since my last Monte Crisco and 20 years since my last Camel. I have been told that my 3 cancers and unwell heart since then are not the result of nicotine.

Anyway, back to raising the cigarette tax

Isn’t it a bit of a moral hazard to allow people to kill themselves for the potential gain in state tax revenue? Even in the no sharp edges allowed world of modern American Liberalism where victims cry out for villains, the ones who caused them to be victims, to be punished isn’t it a bit of a stretch to allow people to kill themselves for budgetary purposes? You want people to die so that we don’t “soak college students with higher tuition”?

Isn’t that a bit like “destroying the village in order to save it”?

What if, Heaven forefend, this cigarette tax increase proves, yet again, that Supply Side Economics works, and causes a net drop in revenue? Will those college students still “get soaked”?

What if, because of the higher taxes, the lure of higher profits subsidizes and enables the smuggling and black market of tobacco to flourish?

Would it be truer to the tenets and glorious History of modern American Liberalism - Rosa Parks not giving up her seat, Gandhi eating the salt, my grandfather’s uncle dying at Gettysburg with the Irish Brigade on July 2, 1863 – not to raise the taxes on cigarettes but, rather, to take the Crusade to its Logical and Moral conclusion?

The big guy in the White House is from Chicago. Who says that God doesn’t have a sense of humor?

I would “hope” that the “change” would be the introduction of legislation banning the use and consumption of all tobacco products in Florida. Are there no honest modern American Liberals left in the press or in the legislature?

We’ll see.

CC – Representative Jim Waldman