Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 5, 1993 TAG: 9302050415
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
TOBACCO TAX
HOLY SMOKE! Lynchburg Sen. Elliot Schewel's proposed 20-cents-a-pack tax on cigarettes has actually made it to the floor of the Virginia Senate! King Tobacco is shaking like a leaf.Schewel says he's not "sanguine" that his bill will make it through the Senate, then through the House of Delegates, then past the veto-poised pen of Gov. ("has fought for Virginians' health and safety") Wilder.
But it should. In the next two years, this bill would raise an estimated $114 million for the state to use for numerous worthy programs - plus an equal amount for local governments.
Of course, if revenue were the only objective it would be as effective to tax peanuts - another of Virginia's revered crops.
The great merit of Schewel's bill is that it is also a public-health measure. Smoking, it's been well-documented, causes more premature deaths than do AIDS, cocaine, heroin, alcohol, fire, automobile accidents, homicides and suicides all put together.
Smoking accounts for as much as 25 percent of all medical costs. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, smoking will add $500 billion to the current generation's health-insurance costs. Virginians will pay the equivalent of $224 per capita in health costs and lost productivity due to smoking.
And this is not to mention the human cost, the deaths of loved ones year after year from an addiction spread by companies that profit from it.
As King Tobacco fears, Schewel's measure might indeed have the effect of inducing some people to smoke less, to quit smoking, or never to take up the habit in the first place. (Even so, the state health department calculates that an 8 percent decline in consumption would result in a mere one-fourth of 1 percent reduction in the Virginia tobacco industry's profits.)
Particularly, the measure might help discourage some teen-agers from getting hooked. The tobacco industry insists, of course, that no, no, it would never want to encourage kids to smoke.
Like Schewel, we're not sanguine about this bill's fate. It is hard to know the prospects, too, of other, more modest proposals to raise Virginia's lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax above the pitiful 2.5-cents-per-pack level.
But there is hope. Schewel's bill miraculously got out of the Senate Finance Committee. (A cheer to Sen. Madison Marye, D-Shawsville, for voting yes - and shame on Sen. Virgil Goode, D-Rocky Mount, for voting no.)
Despite the legislature's long, ignoble record of siding with the powerful tobacco lobby, maybe this will be a year of miraculous resolution, the year that the assembly decides to turn over a new leaf and take the side of the public good against a deadly menace.