
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, August 12, 1994                   TAG: 9408120080
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

COSTING LIVES

ONE OF the biggest disappointments of the health-care debate has been the incredible shrinking cigarette tax. The amount proposed keeps falling and falling, for no apparent reason other than the power of the tobacco lobby to push it down and the weakness of the lawmakers handling it.

Everyone should be clear on two points.

First, a significant increase in the federal cigarette tax would reduce tobacco use, thereby saving over time hundreds of thousands of lives. (National health groups estimate that more lives would be saved by a $2 increase in the excise tax than have been lost in all wars in America's history combined.) The tax would also have its proportionately greatest effect on adolescents, who are more price-sensitive than others and who comprise virtually all new tobacco users.

Surely everyone believes children should be discouraged from starting to smoke. Well, everyone outside the tobacco industry.

The second point is that, even as it reduced tobacco use, a bigger tax would raise more revenues to support health-care reform and to avoid enlarging the federal deficit. By one estimate, a $2-per-pack increase would add $20 billion per year to the U.S. treasury - a significant piece of change.

What's more, in contrast with almost every other tax proposal opposed by majorities of Americans, a big increase in the cigarette tax has been supported by two-thirds of the public in recent opinion polls.

Every year, tobacco kills more Americans than alcohol, car accidents, AIDS, violent crime, heroin, cocaine and crack combined. More than 400,000 deaths per year are attributable to smoking. The economic costs, in health expenses and lost productivity, exceed $100 billion annually.

Because federal and state tobacco taxes have not been indexed to inflation, they fell from half the price of a pack of cigarettes in 1966 to a quarter of the price in 1992. That isn't right. Nor is the measly phased-in 45-cent tax increase proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee nearly enough.

Our representatives should be ashamed if they pass a bill with less than a $2 increase.

by CNB