New Hampshire’s Irresponsibility on the Smoking Behavior

In a new fiscal adventure, Republicans in Concord this week voted to reduce tobacco taxes by a dime per pack of cigarettes. The thinking: Out-of-state smokers will flock to New Hampshire to load up on Bond cheap smokes and, while they’re here, buy who knows what other products to bring about a retail boomlet.
The politicians, apparently taking the fictional part of Reaganomics for real, say that the tax cut will cause state revenues to grow. Time will tell. For what it’s worth, in a fiscal no te to House Bill 156, where the tax cut originated, the Department of Revenue Administration predicts that state tobacco tax revenue in 2012 could fall by more than $7.5 million if the levy is cut from the current $1.78 per pack to $1.68.
But assume the Republicans are right in their expectations of more revenues. Does that make the tax cut the responsible thing they say it is?
It does not, for a larger reason. The tax cut strategy is to draw smokers from neighboring states that, unlike New Hampshire, are making an effort to discourage tobacco consumption among their people on the grounds that smoking is a public health menace; the New Hampshire strategy would reduce the flow of cigarette tax dollars to those states, which run tobacco-education programs. Here are the facts:
Vermont, which levies a tax of $2.24 per pack, is spending $4.5 million of its own money this year on anti-smoking programs for its citizens.
Massachusetts, which levies a tax of $2.51 per pack, is spending $4.5 million of its own money on anti-smoking programs for its citizens.
Maine, which levies a tax of $2 per pack, is spending $9.9 million of its own money on anti-smoking programs for its citizens.
New Hampshire, which may soon have a tax of $1.68 per pack, spends zero dollars of its own money on anti-smoking programs, though annually 1,700 of its adults die from smoking-related illnesses and many more Granite Staters are exposed to tobacco smoke.
The only money spent in this state to discourage smoking comes from the hated feds: $1 million this year from the Centers for Disease Control to draft anti-smoking policies and messages, plus about $800,000 from the federal stimulus to help fund such things as a telephone-based service for people who want to quit smoking, in addition to $56,815 from last year’s heath reform bill to discourage pregnant women from smoking.
There you have it. New Hampshire, which ranks dead last among all states in trying to reduce smoking among its own citizens, sees a fiscal bounty in robbing other states of the resources that they would use to minimize the danger of the habit among their citizens.