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Between and Rock and an Oppressive, Democratic Place

Jimmie | August 13, 2008 | Comments (0)

Nothing makes you feel good about your state like the Wall Street Journal pointing at the collective heads of knuckle we call state legislators and laughing.

Politicians in Annapolis are scratching their heads wondering what happened to all those chain smokers who were supposed to help balance Maryland’s budget. Last year the legislature doubled the cigarette tax to $2 a pack to pay for expanded health-care coverage. Eight months later, cigarette sales have plunged 25% and the state is in fiscal distress again.

A few pols are pretending to be happy that 30 million fewer cigarette packs have been bought in the state so far this year. As House Majority Leader Kumar Barve put it, fewer people smoking is “a good thing.” Yes, except that Maryland may be losing retail sales more than smokers. Residents of Maryland’s Washington suburbs can shop in nearby Virginia, where the tax is only 30 cents a pack, and save at least $15 per carton.

It gets worse. If I were to get caught carrying more than one pack of cigarettes on me that don’t have a Maryland tax stamp on them, I can be fined for it. So let’s say that I went on a trip out of town and, on that trip, I picked up a carton of smokes at the very beginning. If I haven’t smoked nine packs of those cigarettes by the time I get back home, I could get in trouble with the cigarette tax police.

And yes, we have cigarette tax police in Maryland. And yes, they do hawk the stores just over the line looking for folks with Maryland tags who buy a carton or two of smokes and head back home. And yes, they do pull those people over. Hooray for us.

Now it seems as if the Democrats here are ignorant of the basic economic principle that if you raise taxes on something, the activity on that something goes down. But they’re not. They’ve been running a nice little scan here for a couple or three years. They tell one group of people how bad smoking is and that they’re raising the cigarette tax to dissuade people from buying those evil cancer sticks. Then they turn around and tell a few other groups that they’re going to raise a ton of tax money, based on current sales of cigarettes that they know darned well are going to drop, and all that tax oney is going to go to their favorite government programs.

Then they sit back and coast back into office on Election Day.

What I find a little embarrassing is that my fellow Marylanders haven’t caught onto the scam yet. Perhaps this year they will.