Cigarette taxes are the best way to cut smoking, scaring Big Tobacco
Excerpt: “… many states — Missouri, Kentucky and Georgia among them — have not significantly increased their cigarette fees in decades, bowing to pressure from tobacco lobbyists and an ingrained antipathy among conservatives to raising taxes of any kind. As a result, America’s smokers are increasingly concentrated in states where cigarettes are cheap. A pack of cigarettes will soon cost $13 in New York City, where a tax hike of $2.50 was recently passed. But in Kentucky — the state with the highest rate of smokers, at 25.9 percent, compared with the national rate of 15 percent — you can buy that same pack for $4.77 on average.”
