22 June 2018 — 0759 mdt
Effects of income and tobacco taxes on smoking rates
Back in March, when it became clear that Montana’s hospitals and Montana’s Democrats favored raising tobacco taxes to pay for extending expanded Medicaid, I pulled together some data on smoking from the Centers for Disease Control to construct the following graph displaying the rough relationship between smoking rates and income, and smoking rates and state cigarette taxes.
There are no surprises here. Smoking inversely correlates with income, and with the size of tax a state levies on tobacco. Income, of course, tends to have a positive correlation with education; thus there’s truth in the conventional wisdom that poor people with little education beyond high school are more likely to smoke that richer people with college degrees.
If I-185 makes Montana’s general election ballot, the initiative’s supporters probably will issue a blizzard of charts, tables, and white papers, arguing that raising Montana’s tax on tobacco will lower the use of tobacco in Montana.
Reducing smoking rates is a good thing. Increasing taxes on the poor is not. Levying a sin tax to pay for extending expanded Medicaid is an act of desperation.