Senate can save kids’ lives with cigarette tax hike

A LOT HAS CHANGED since the House voted a year ago to raise South Carolina’s cigarette tax from the lowest in the nation to the eighth-lowest.

The state budget has gone from surplus to deficit, with most state agencies facing budget cuts. Public concern over access and affordability of medical care has shot up, as more and more families either lose insurance coverage or foresee the day when they will.

The changes make it more tempting than ever to focus on secondary issues as the Senate finally gets down to serious debate on the cigarette tax. So before things get too far off track, let’s take a moment to step back and consider why lawmakers need to raise this tax.

It is not primarily in order to increase the number of South Carolinians who are covered by public or private health insurance, although that certainly would help us all — the people who would get better medical care as well as the rest of us, who would be subject to less cost-shifting from hospitals trying to make up for the free care the federal government forces them to provide.

It is not primarily in order to generate more money to pay for our state’s most urgent needs, although we certainly have more than our share — from bulging-at-the-seams prisons to underpoliced highways, from inadequate psychiatric care to insufficient incentives to attract the best teachers to poor, rural schools with moldy walls and leaky toilets.

The primary reason lawmakers need to increase our cigarette tax — the one reason that is reason enough by itself, without considering any of the many other benefits — is to price children out of the market, to keep them from taking that first puff that will lead to a lifetime of addiction to a killer drug.

The effect of a higher cigarette tax is not mere theory. In state after state, higher cigarette taxes have produced lower smoking rates among minors — just as higher retail prices after the national tobacco settlement produced lower youth smoking rates. The consistent trend: For every 10 percent increase in the cost of cigarettes, youth smoking drops 7 percent.

Now, preventing minors from smoking is a victory in itself, much as preventing them from drinking alcohol is a victory; that’s why both are illegal. But higher cigarette taxes buy more than time: The longer someone waits to try cigarettes, the less likely it is that he will become an addict — or even try them at all. That’s in part because the adolescent brain is more receptive to nicotine addiction than the adult brain, and in part because the ridiculous “cool” factor becomes less important as people mature.

Advocates project that raising South Carolina’s cigarette tax to 57 cents — still just half the national average — will prevent 35,500 South Carolina kids who are alive today from becoming smokers; another 18,700 adults will quit or won’t start smoking.

Some of the proposals for spending the $53 million that a 50-cent cigarette tax would generate are wiser than others. Some are more practical than others. But while it’s always important to spend tax dollars wisely, this is one of those rare, rare cases where simply raising the tax should be the end, the goal, and everything else should be treated as a secondary matter. The cigarette tax increase, wildly popular among voters, only runs into trouble when lawmakers lose sight of that essential truth. So they must keep their eyes on it.