Sunday, February 22, 2004
Chicago Sun-Times
Letter to the Editor

By a 9-8 vote, Cook County commissioners have tentatively approved an 82-cents-a-pack increase in the cigarette tax, bringing the county's tax to $1 a pack, with Roberto Maldonado claiming simultaneously that the increase would cause people to quit smoking and raise revenues -- taking the illogical position of trying to save the lives of some by profiting off the deaths of others.

As for his claim that it will reduce health care costs, doesn't the premature death of smokers actually save the government money it would spend on Medicare, Social Security benefits and other expenses associated with elderly care? And wouldn't that also justify a tax on double cheeseburgers?

There is evidence from New York City, which passed a whopping $1.50-a-pack tax increase in 2002, that one of the unintended consequences of raising cigarette taxes significantly is a surge in cigarette bootlegging, drawing to the increasingly lucrative illegal cigarette trade a variety of criminals, including individuals with ties to terrorist organizations.

The New York Police Department has formed a special unit to deal with cigarette smuggling, and it so far has made 146 arrests and seized six cars, as well as $250,000 in cash and 30,000 cartons of cigarettes. The city is being divided into turf as gangs fight for territory, not unlike what happened during Prohibition with alcohol.

Recently, federal authorities in Charlotte, N.C., charged 18 people, mostly from Lebanon, with buying cigarettes in Charlotte, where the tobacco tax is just 5 cents a pack, and then hauling them to Michigan, which raised tobacco taxes to 75 cents per pack in 1994, and selling them without paying Michigan's tax. The operation is believed to have raised millions of dollars over a four-year period, with the profits going to the terrorist group Hezbollah.

Cigarette taxes kill.

Daniel John Sobieski, Garfield Ridge