If its latest scheme to snatch a half-trillion dollars in new cigarette taxes becomes law, Uncle Sam -- raking in a huge national sales tax -- will have a vested interest in the continuation of smoking.
Look ahead. One day there will be a recession and the budget will plunge into deficit. Popular handouts like free milk for children in prison will be dependent on the tax revenue from tobacco sales, just as education will depend on tax receipts from gambling casinos.
Result: further political dependency on ''sin taxes,'' the government's cut of profit on booze, crapshooting and smoking. What politician is now likely to cut out programs supported by tobacco billions, or raise taxes the painful way to balance a budget? No; if you depend on sin, you are inclined to protect it.
A sin tax is a tax that falls heaviest on the poor. The cause is not that the poor do more wrong than the rich, but that there are many more poor to do wrong. Under the McCain-Clinton plan, a cigar-puffing plutocrat will pay a pittance more for the pleasure of smoking while the worker earning $20,000 a year will have to pay the Government nearly one tenth of his total wages.
But it's for his own good, think liberals who have just delightedly discovered the disincentive of taxation. Because smoking is filthy and unhealthy, we are helping the poor person who dares to indulge his lust to smoke by making him pay a whopping fine. He'll stop smoking or go broke.
The tobacco-bashers don't even whisper that because 50 million bumper stickers would soon appear saying ''I smoke and I vote.'' Instead, the campaign against everybody smoking is pegged on saving the children.
Using that unassailable aim, tax-and-spend politicians would make adult smokers, who do well over 90 percent of the smoking, pay up to two bucks a pack more for their habit -- supposedly to discourage teen smokers by making the purchase too costly for those on a parental allowance.
Even if the protect-the-kids pitch were true and not just a political adman's deft mode of persuasion, it would mean that rich kids could smoke and poor kids could not.
Do we really want officialdom to introduce the horrors of economic inequity to 13-year-olds? If the Katzenjammer kids see rich Rollo taking a deep drag on a pleasure only he can afford, are they not given an incentive to steal it -- thereby creating a lifelong habit of crime? Or to buy a pack around the corner from an entrepreneur who buys tobacco in bulk and rolls it into tax-evasive, affordable coffin nails?
Not only would the smokiller's currently popular plan place a huge tax on the poor and make the Government dependent on the prolongation of the tobacco habit, it would make smoking an even greater symbol of youthful rebellion.
That's why the current cockiness among legislators in Washington -- riding a popular wave of revulsion at the past lies of tobacco executives -- is so wrongheaded. The victors won't settle for the sort of medium self-immolation negotiated out of the tobacco industry by state attorneys general; they want financial punishment to satisfy the most ardent smoker-haters and ease the way for Washington's big spenders.
Small wonder that the industry, showing prudent concern for its customers, stockholders and employees, refuses to trade away constitutional rights to advertise a dangerous product that lawmakers do not have the courage to outlaw.
The tax-'em-to-death notion is a huge hoax designed to raise regressive sales taxes painlessly. Such taxing is no good for you just as smoking is no good for you.
The difference is that taxation stunts economic growth but smoking kills. I quit smoking 30 years ago because I have the yen to survive, but I have no right to live off those foolish enough to smoke. How, then, to help others kick the habit without making Government a smoking-tax addict?
Control nicotine as the drug it is. Take the big marketing
concessions squeezed out of the chastened industry before the
deal-breakers waded in. And set an example for your own kids.