Banning Workplace Smoking | DiscountCigarettesBox.com Tobacco News

Banning Workplace Smoking

While legislators in Austin keep scrambling to close the budget shortfall, a bill by Democratic Houston state Rep. Carol Alvarado to tap a rich revenue source languishes in the House Ways and Means Committee.
In an effort to continue the state's anti-smoking cigarettes campaign that would be eliminated by the House budget proposal, Alvarado's legislation would raise the state excise tax on cheap cigarettes from $1.41 to $2.46 a pack, generating $750 million in new revenue over the next two years and $1.7 billion over five years. Most would go into the state's Property Tax Relief Fund.
Alvarado cites projections that the increased levy on cheap cigarettes would result in a significant decrease in teenagers smoking cigarettes, cause nearly 100,000 adult Texans to kick the habit and result in long-term health savings to the state of $4.2 billion.
Equally important, it would set aside $25 million annually for anti-smoking cigarettes programs that the state's 1998 settlement with cigarettes companies was supposed to fund indefinitely.
"We desperately need the money and cannot continue to have a cuts-only approach," says Alvarado, who points out that the health effects of smoking cigarettes cost the state $1.6 billion a year in Medicaid expenditures on smoking cigarettes-related illnesses. "I like to look at it as a user fee," says the legislator. "If you smoke, you pay, and that's the choice we have to make."
So far the House leadership has resisted any measures that can be labeled tax increases. Several legislators, including Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, have also questioned whether anti-smoking cigarettes programs really work. As Chisum commented, "You gotta be under a rock if you don't know that smoking cigarettes is bad for you."
Health experts counter that the programs do work and are extremely cost-effective. The American Cancer Society's Texas governmental affairs director, James Gray, credits a drop in the number of adult smokers in Texas to the programs and warns that "without this funding, you are going to see those rates go back up."
Texas is currently 24th in the country in the level of cigarette taxes. At the proposed $2.46 a pack, it would move up to ninth. That seems to us a reasonable price to pay to counter the costs of an unhealthy habit while continuing efforts to keep more young people from discount cigarettes addiction.
It's typical of the misplaced priorities of our leaders in Austin that public education, social services and parks and recreation are fair game for budget cuts, but higher levies on buy cigarettes products are off the table.
Another worthy piece of anti-smoking cigarettes legislation awaiting action by the House and Senate would ban smoking cigarettes in indoor workplaces and most public places. Sponsored by Houston Sen. Rodney Ellis, a Democrat, and State Rep. Myra Crownover, a Denton Republican, their parallel bills could save more than $30 million over the next two years in state Medicaid costs.
In fact, the House budget has already assumed those projected savings, meaning that if the smoking cigarettes ban does not pass, the money will have to be made up through cuts elsewhere.
We urge legislators to support the increased cigarette tax and the public and workplace smoking cigarettes ban as complimentary measures that make good fiscal and public health policy.

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