Smoking & Taxes.

Alright, Back by popular demand

I'm Rowsdower, the producer of your Hard Rain show, defender of the faith, the pompetus of love, conservative hippie and I'm sick of this crap! 

This cigarette tax crap!

When did smokers become the acceptable whipping boy for American society? Barack Obama can take over car companies, hire & fire CEO's, and quadruple the budget deficit. The media says nothing. The one thing they have been willing to criticize him on? Smoking. 

Yeah Obama smokes. We hear about it but we never see it. No one can get a picture of this man smoking. You can get pictures of Area 51, Britney Spears Vagina, and of course the flag draped coffins of American Soldiers returning home, but not the, "New Messiah," the most visible man on the face of the earth, smoking a Marlboro. Nobody can get a picture of that, but he is somewhat criticized for it.

Anyway, smokers are the recipients of one of Obama's earliest broken campaign promises. That would be his promise not to raise taxes on "95% of all Americans," the promise not to raise taxes on those making less than $250,000 a year. This past February the President signed the, "Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009," or as I call it ChipRA '09. This was to expand health care coverage for the children. Barf. 

Nothing against the children, I'm sure I have some. But I been hearing this garbage about the children since I was a child myself. I knew it was crap then and I know its crap now. 

This bill for the children raised the Federal Tax on cigarettes from 39 cents a pack to $1.01 a pack. That's an increase of 62 cents or 158%. More than double! I guess it could be worse, after all he did quadruple the already record deficits Bush ran up. 

But guess what Mr President? I don't make $250,000 a year. And you raised my taxes. The CDC says about 1 in 5 or 20% of Americans smoke. That means 20% minimum of the American people got a tax increase. Far above the 5% percent you fraudulently promised. In addition more than half of all smokers are low income, and 1 in 4, or 25% are officially classified as poor. Smokers are by and large poor, lower-middle, and middle class Americans. Many don't even have health insurance themselves but they subsidize it for the children of families of four earning up to $80,000 per year under SCHIP

I know what you're thinking, Quit smoking Rowsdower! Well,
    A) Fuck you 
    B) Fuck off and 
    C) If I could quit smoking would I be paying these damn taxes?

No, and I'll quit smoking when they pry the cigarettes from my cold, black lungs.

Here's the best part of Obama raising the Federal tax so much. People will smoke less. So less taxes will be collected by the federal government and also by the state governments. The State governments are far more dependent on revenue from cigarette sales than the Feds. To make up for this revenue shortfall guess what state governments will do. RAISE CIGARETTE TAXES! Which will lead to less people smoking, which will lead to lower revenues from cigarette taxes, which will lead to raising cigarette taxes, and the whole cycle starts over. 

Several states are considering or have already raised their taxes on cigarettes. In fact the state of North Carolina just raised its cigarette taxes from 35 cent to 45 cent this past Tuesday September 1st. This was to go along with increases to the sales tax, gas tax, and taxes on beer, wine, and liquor. This is all courtesy of Governor Beverly Perdue who is trying to make up for a budget shortfall of as much as $3.2 billion. 

And that's what I resent the most. The good politicians in the state of NC, or any other state for that matter, didn't wake up some morning sick with worry about smokers and conclude the only way to help these poor smoking souls would be to raise the taxes on cigarettes. No. They needed money and lots of it and they needed it now. 

If you play out the cycle I mentioned a minute ago, of raising taxes leading to less smokers, leading to lower tax revenue, leading back to raising taxes again, Eventually you have such a small pool of smokers that you can't collect very much money no matter how high the taxes. Say you had 1,000,000 smokers left each smoking a pack a day or 365 packs a year. That's 365 million packs a year for the government to tax. Even if the tax, just the federal tax, was 10 bucks a pack the government would collect just 3.65 billion dollars a year. That may sound like a lot of money, and it is, for a person, or even a business. But the Federal government spent $2.98 Trillion dollars in 2008 not counting bailouts. That works out to more than $8.1 billion per day!

Meaning, what the government would collect is less than 1/2 of what the Government spends in a day. Its nothing to them!

So aren't they worried about running out of money to pay for "health care" for the children. Nope, because the government will just find another group thats acceptable to demonize, and start taxing them.

Maybe fat people. You're already hearing about proposals to start taxing soft drinks, and fast food from some state and city governments.

So pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Where have I heard that before? And look out fattie they're coming for you next.

But don't forget the next step, the most important step. The reason all the other steps were taken. 

Tax it. 

Even if it does hit the poorest, the hardest. Tax it. The poor you claim to wanna help because you're such a good liberal.

Tax it and tax it and tax it.

Bastards!

and Say hi to your mother for me okay.