Vice Charge

When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a bill raising the city's cigarette tax from 8 cents to $1.50 a pack, he was ostensibly approving a revenue measure. "City officials say the new tax will bring a much-needed $111 million into the city's coffers this year," The New York Times reported, "helping plug a budget shortfall of nearly $5 billion."

But according to Bloomberg, it was all about saving lives. In fact, the mayor said, "This may be the most important measure my administration takes to save people's lives." More-expensive cigarettes mean fewer smokers, Bloomberg reasons, which mean fewer deaths from lung cancer, heart disease, and other smoking-related illnesses. "If it were totally up to me," he said, "I would raise the cigarette tax so high the revenues from it would go to zero."

Bloomberg thus declares the purity of his own motives, even as he takes his cut from a business the anti-smoking movement depicts as inherently evil, sacrificing lives on the altar of greed. When a New Yorker buys a pack of Marlboros, the city will make four or five times as much as Philip Morris does. But that's OK, because the mayor would just as soon forgo the money, if it were totally up to him.

Bloomberg's pose also illustrates a contradiction at the center of the anti-smoking movement, which insists that smokers can't help themselves. "This is not exactly freedom of choice," the mayor informed opponents of the tax hike, "given that smoking is addictive and that the industry spends billions of dollars to get people hooked on it." Yet he was confident that smokers would respond to higher cigarette prices by quitting rather than, say, economizing on other expenditures, getting a second job, dipping into their savings, going into debt, or turning to crime.

Those are not the only options, of course. With a state tax of $1.50 a pack, the highest in the nation, New Yorkers were already paying more for cigarettes than other Americans. The new city tax raises the price of some brands to $7.50 or so, twice the national average. In response, many smokers will buy cigarettes online, on Indian reservations, in other cities and states, or on the black market. The cigarette tax in New York City is now more than 100 times the levy in Virginia, an irresistible opportunity for smugglers.

Still, Bloomberg is no doubt right that some smokers will quit rather than pay exorbitant prices or go to the trouble of finding alternative supplies. But that choice will demonstrate that they were never the helpless victims he makes them out to be.