Taxes on Cigarettes :: Essays Papers

Taxes on CigarettesThe article Smoke Signals, by the New York quantify and the New tee shirt Sunday edition, presented an overview of for the state of New Jerseys recent decline in coffin nails bought in the last year. The article starts come to by explaining to the reader how smokers took a financial beating at the exchange register every time they went to a convenience store to deal butt joints. In a smokers reduction movement the state of New Jersey doubled the gross sales appraise on cigarettes forcing smokers to spend an extra xl cents on every pack they bought. Len Fishman, the state commissioner of Health and Senior services, verbalise that the value accession was meant to drive down the consumption entirely. As Mr. Fishman traveled around the state he discovered that many people were already trying to quite smoking, they just never had the right physical pauperism to pursue their goal. These people explained that the dramatic add-on on tax was the last straw th at broke the camels back, and provided the right motivation for them to quite smoking. The tax increase put New Jersey behind only Hawaii and Alaska at $1 a pack, and Washington state at 82.5 cents a pack. all over a sise month purpose the revenue collected from cigarette sales had dropped by 12 percentage. For 1998 the revenue earned by cigarette sales should have been roughly 54.2 million cartons, but with the tax increase that number had been dropped to 47.4 million cartons. This gap represents a 6.8 million carton difference, an large(p) decrease in cigarette sales.To all smokers the tax increase factor a substantial amount of money will be requirement to maintain their habits. Some smokers will go through great lengths to uphold as much money as possible, even if it means travel to other states to buy their smokes. Both Pennsylvania and Delaware reported a operative increase in cigarette sales over the next six months after the tax took affect. Over a one year period Delaware even had a ten percent increase, manly due to the tax increase in New Jersey. The state of Massachusetts raised their tax 25 cents a pack in 1992 and reported a 12.5 percent decrease in sales the following year.Certainly a more(prenominal) alarming statistic is not necessarily how much the tax has decreased the sales of cigarettes, although very impressive and healthy, but rather the percent of under senior(a) children and high school students who already smoke and who are beginning to smoke.