The usual political slant is now outpouring from the news media like Rosie & Trump on meth. The congress is going to speak for the people and pass a "resolution" to send a message to the white house. Spending bills will start rolling out of the capital dome like an lava flow of pig slop. Bureaucrats will be slurping up all the pork belly spending while we all sit at home and sign our stack of forms for the 2006 tax year.
Here in Oregon we are going to provide health care for our underprivileged kids with monies collected by our over privilaged smokers via a $.85 a pack increase in the cigarette tax. Funny thing is, all the smokers I know, are the ones with 3-5 kids and no health insurance, so why don't we just provide 1 month of health care for every couple of cartons of smokes they buy and skip all the middle men. You know that with the price of smokes already around $4-$5 per pack smokers are going to either quit or get them on the black market to avoid the tax.We already have a state tax of $1.18 per pack today, and ranked the 16th in the highest tax on cigarettes. Much of this goes to our state health care entitlement program and this is all depending on a market that declines each year. They claim to be raising the tax to pay for more services but it seems to me they must raise the tax to yield the same revenue with the fewer packs of smokes sold each year. This is the most near sighted policy I have ever seen.
Another way to fund heath care for those less fortunate would be with Marlboro miles, or Camel Bucks, you know those tags on the packs that usually are saved up for a free t-shirt or wind breaker. Chemo-therapy treatments for lung cancer could cost like 20,000 Marlboro miles, you have to figure by the time you get cancer from smoking you would have plenty of miles saved for your treatments.
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