Over 350 miles and 6 hours of driving later...

[wolfwings]

...I have voted.

Mostly NOT for people, but for things.

No on everything except 1A (lock all gas taxes to road-use only with a repeatable-every-X-time-units exception) and 87 (punt another few cents tax on gas) myself.

I specifically voted no on the 'almost three dollars a pack' tobacco tax, because that will more than double the cost of smokes. That's too large a tax-hike all at once, IMHO. Raise it, sure, but don't just sneak in and more than double the price.

Comments

[genkitty.livejournal.com]

*chuckle* And here I am wishing we could tax cigs @ $10/cig. That's right, $10 for a single smoke. Hell, I'd vote yes for $1000/cig. If we can't get the things outlawed entirely, I'll settle for pricing them out of the stratosphere. Then again, I'm very very passionate about anti-smoking stuffs. I also think that every smoker should be allowed to trade in his/her smokes for chewing tabacky, so s/he can get the fix without impacting the health of others :)

Problem with that idea...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...is that even $2.70/pack tax would make tobacco expensive enough it would slip into the range where it becomes more affordable to try to get it through illegal means than legitimately where some restrictions to prevent children and teenagers from getting it can be kept in place.

And if you tax smoking tobacco but not chewing tobacco, well... you just change the name everyone buys it under, just like they aren't buying crack-pipes, they're buying tiny lapel-roses that happen to come in glass pipes.

Pricing something so as to be prohibitively expensive never works, and neither does making something completely illegal to possess if it's addictive, and there is a reason Nicotine is considered the 'Gold Standard' for addictiveness. People have had to have their voice boxes cut out due to cancer, and even then can't manage to stop smoking. It was used to great effect in an anti-smoking ad in fact.

Restrict where it can be used, sure, or start to require those smoke-trap devices you light the smoke inside of and suck the smoke out of at one end and prevents the smoke going anywhere else, to guarantee that it doesn't affect anyone else, but making it illegal is counter-productive, and pricing it insanely high in effect makes it illegal, again causing people to circumvent all your restrictions to get it in the first place.