Forget About Health and Common Sense

It's time to take up smoking cigarettes. We gotta pay for that SCHIP crap somehow:

There are some differences in detail between the Senate and House bills authorizing massive expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), yet the competing plans have this much in common: Some states will be winners, others will be losers, but they’re all going to have to recruit millions of new smokers. This is because both plans depend on an increase in the federal tax on cigarettes, with the House version upping the levy 45 cents and the Senate 61 cents.

Add a higher federal tax . . . and it is impossible to envision sufficient revenues to finance SCHIP as Congress intends. So Congress will need millions of new tobacco customers to replace those who quit, die or reduce consumption. At least 9 million new smokers will be needed during the next five years to ensure sufficient revenues to pay for the expanded SCHIP program. And that illustrates yet another law of economic reality — government actions almost always have unintended consequences, and they are usually bad.

Hey, smoking stinks and it's bad for you; tax the crap out of it. Just don't you, as a congressional fraud, pretend that you have a lick of sense by tyring to pay for every pie-in-the-sky feel-good program by having the cost onto an indefensible subclass of Americans.

Start smoking today; it's for the children.