Evolution and Christianity and Salvation

[The Grand Nudger]

That's actually a pretty good example, because while it's demonstrably the case that a rise in tobacco taxes correlates with a decrease in smoking, it's also the case that public confidence and comfort in the taxes hinge on how that revenue is employed.   Which, for reference, is poorly.  Those taxes produce millions but very little goes to smoking cessation or prevention, or to a fund for treatment.  It mostly goes to the general budget of whatever state levies it.  Now, this isn't always bad, swedens carbon axes aren't earmarked either...but whereas people in the one example have confidence that their government is using that revenue well, we realize that ours mostly goes to balancing state budgets in light of their laundry lists of garbage costs.

With the above in mind, it's easy to then see how a tobacco farmer might find such taxes even more onerous.  Not only is that revenue poorly employed from the standpoint of cessation, it's poorly employed from the standpoint of industry transition.  Burley producing areas have been left destitute, and we can moralize all we want about how the people growing tobacco can't really complain when the country stops doing some shitty thing that their incomes depend on...but we have to remember that they have mortgages as well.  There was a great opportunity to earmark some of those tobacco taxes to help producers, and there have been limited cases of it being done, but they;re just that..limited.  As it so happens, those regions could have been making more producing other crops all along, and we've recently figured that out and there's a big push to make that happen....but that push comes too late for those put out of business, whose farms became real estate and that real estate became a gated community or suburb and is now locked under concrete.  

So, tobacco taxes, poorly implemented from many standpoints and not at all implemented with public confidence (or even by a government that the public has confidence in), and yet they still worked.  The thing they had going for them, that got them through the barriers that other reduction through taxation schemes fail on account of, was that it was a sin tax. Understanding these successes and failures is instrumental to any future attempt at taxes like them, carbon taxes being part of the set. Tobacco taxes could have been even more aggressive and it would stand to reason that the correlative reductions would have been more aggressive as well. The money could have been better spent to further maximize the anti-smoking campaign, and it could have been better spent to help tobacco producing regions transition to something even more profitable. Many interested parties could have been more thoroughly and meaningfully included and the outcome, as decent as it is on it's own merits, could have been improved. In light of that, while swedens carbon taxes provide real world demonstration that the fossil fuel industry's propaganda is just that, propaganda....it's also true that their example isn't the final word on the subject. That model can be taken as a lesson and then improved on. Similarly, the failures of our ultimately successful tobacco taxes ought to be taken into account as well so that we don't fail so many americans even as we do the right thing.

That taxes can cause hardship and that tax revenue can be misallocated is a legitimate concern, but it's not a reason not to levy the tax, it's an argument for levying it well.