The NH Democrat's Dishonesty About Tobacco - Granite Grok

The NH Democrat’s Dishonesty About Tobacco

On 6-6-12 I provided an update on the state of tobacco tax revenue in New Hampshire.  Buried in that post were some observations about how hypocritical and dishonest Democrats in the Granite state are about tobacco and their obsession with taxing it.  A hypocrisy they themselves may not even grasp.  So I wanted to excerpt that portion separately with a few minor edits.  Here it is.

Democrats complained publicly and often about lower tobacco revenue after the tax was first lowered.  But isn’t that the point of the tax?  To lower consumption and therefore revenue?  To end a practice many in government, and more so in the nanny wing, argue adds to the long term cost borne by the public?  Is that not the goal?  To make smoking history?

And we know that raising the tax reduces consumption, and lowers traffic into New Hampshire to buy tobacco (and anything else) because we’ve seen it happen.  So less tobacco revenue always had to be the goal for Democrats if they are being even remotely honest about it.   This means that at some point New Hampshire was going to have to look someplace else for that revenue–or  were NH Democrats planning on increasing the tax per pack on the last smoker to $30 million (or whatever it is) to make up for everyone else who had quit at their urging?

Do you see how stupid that logic is?

If Decreased consumption really is the goal then lower tobacco revenue should have had our left leaning friends dancing in their liberal ghettos.  But instead, they got mad, called it irresponsible, and get this…even deigned to insult parents all across the state by suggesting that the lower tax would increase youth smoking (which no parent could ever prevent without State Democrats to help them), all of which is a perverse twist of irony because the only way the Democrats would ever gather more revenue from tobacco in the first place is to either get young people to take up the habit (which they claim to object to) or to attract more traffic from outside New Hampshire–which raising the tax on tobacco actually reduces.

The people in the Democrat party leadership are dopes, yes?  When are our residents including other Democrats going to notice?  (Or have they already?)

For New Hampshire’s Progressives to cry about lower tobacco revenue suggests that they don’t really care about smoking at all, nor whatever health risks they claim it presents.  All they care about is revenue and no one cares about revenue unless you plan on spending it.  So they are only looking to raise the tax so that they can then falsely estimate even higher revenues and then spend that before the real–and much lower–numbers roll in.   (And we know this to be true, because that is exactly how they ran the state when we were dumb enough to let them.)

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