Our View: Tax cigarettes out of kids' budgets

During a recent trip to New York City, a member of the Post-Bulletin's editorial board noticed that there were relatively few cigarette butts on the sidewalks and streets. The air in Manhattan was rich with the smell of roasting nuts and fresh-made gyros and bagels, but cigarette smoke seldom intruded into the mix.

There's a simple explanation for this phenomenon: Cost. If you try to buy a pack of cigarettes in New York City, a $10 bill won't do the job. State and local taxes of $5.85 per pack have pushed the price up to $14 in some areas — the highest in the nation. A string of tax increases since 2002 has pushed 450,000 New York City smokers to kick the habit, and the smoking rate among high school students has plummeted to 7 percent.

In Minnesota, by comparison, The American Lung Association says the teen smoking rate is 19 percent.

That's reason enough for us to support Sen. Carla Nelson's proposal to add another dollar to Minnesota's state cigarette tax, which currently is $1.59 per pack.

Multiple studies have found that young smokers are the most price-sensitive, which means that the best way to keep kids from smoking is to make it too expensive. And, given that 80 percent of adult smokers became addicted before age 18, the benefit of the new tax is fairly obvious: If teenagers can't afford to smoke, they'll be unlikely to pick up the expensive, deadly habit when they get "real jobs" and higher incomes.

It's somewhat surprising for a Republican to be proposing a tax increase, but Nelson could rightly argue that this is a true "user fee." If you don't smoke, it won't affect you at all.

Furthermore, Nelson has specific purposes in mind for the new revenue the tax increase would bring in. She'd start by repaying the $700 million the state "borrowed" from K-12 public schools last summer. When that debt has been repaid, she wants to dedicate future revenues to reduce property taxes on businesses. That, of course, should make Nelson's proposal more popular with her Republican colleagues — while drawing criticism from DFLers who will have other ideas on how to spend the new revenue.

But ultimately, we can only hope that the state's revenue from cigarette taxes (more than $400 million per year) will begin to decrease, to the point that even the most draconian of per-pack tax increases can't make up the shortfall.

The goal, after all, isn't to maximize the amount of money Minnesota reaps from the sales of cigarettes; rather, it's to reduce our smoking rate to the point that tobacco taxes are no longer a significant source of revenue.

How would we fill that $400 million hole in the state budget? Well, the $3 billion we wouldn't be spending on smoking-related illnesses would be a good start.