BuckeyeBlog

While you’ll not often find me praising Governor Ted Strickland, it seems he has done something that is worth at least lukewarm praise. In light of calls to raise tobacco taxes, the Governor has indicated that he won’t be supporting any measures to increase taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products. As I wrote about here, there is no reason to increase tobacco taxes even further. Tobacco users already pay a disproportionate amount in taxes and it is simply bad policy to further target these users to pay for government services.

Of course, I can’t be too generous to the Governor because the current tobacco tax issue is tied in with his plan to raid the tobacco settlement fund to pay for his economic development boondoggle. There are so many issues involved here that should anger any fan of small government (the notion of a state foundation to battle tobacco use is ridiculous as is the idea that it is proper for the government to try and stimulate the economy through borrowing money) that no one involved in this issue has clean hands. But the Governor does deserve credit for resisting calls to increase tobacco taxes.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 11:38 am and is filed under Stimulus plan, Strickland, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.