From Progressive Oasis and the Suttle camp comes this:
Although AKSARBENT thinks Omaha will be better served by a Suttle administration than a Stothert regime, one thing sticks in our craw about Suttle and his supporters: the criticism of Stothert for her lack of "public" support for a cancer center, as seen in the video above.
What Suttle and his minions aren't upfront about is that "public support" has meant yet another increase in cigarette taxes, borne by a distinct minority of the public.
In 1989, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study of sin taxes which concluded that even way back then, smokers covered the economic costs of their habit through federal and state taxes on cigarettes. (Drinkers, on the other hand, did not.)
Since then, taxes on cigarettes have skyrocketed. In fact, smokers do not cost society more on their way to the grave than nonsmokers, in no small part because they pay in excess of $100 billion a year in tobacco taxes and because they die sooner, saving the government and society HUGE amounts of money in social security, medicare and pension payments.
(These and other facts are not included in the CDC's periodic and laughable reports on the "Economic Impact" of smoking, designed to portray smokers as fiscal drags on society, in order to provide cover for politicians to raise tobacco taxes, in order to make smoking so expensive that teens will be discouraged from taking up the habit, since the CDC's efforts in that area have hit a wall in recent years.)
Since smokers are now subsiziding nonsmokers, it's time for Jim Suttle and "progressives" to stop pretending that smokers are economic parasites in order to justify unending raids on their pocketbooks and to stop victimizing them with regressive taxes for projects which should be funded by everyone or not at all.
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