Regressive but positive.

Byline: The Register-Guard

For sheer brass, for pure towering chutzpah, it's hard to top the tobacco companies' claims that tobacco taxes are unfair to poor people. That's the argument the tobacco companies' public relations wizards are making against the tobacco tax increases currently being debated in Oregon and in Washington, D.C. It's an argument worthy of an industry whose sales pitches are aimed at obscuring the fact that its product kills its customers.

Like much of the best propaganda, a thread of plausibility runs through the tobacco companies' claim. A rich smoker and a poor smoker pay the same tax on a pack of cigarettes, but the tax takes a larger share of the poor person's income. That makes the tobacco tax regressive.

What's more, the Americans who are most likely to smoke are those with low incomes. So tobacco taxes are doubly tilted against the poor. There they go again, the tobacco industry crows: those politicians in Salem and Washington, D.C., are seeking to support a politically popular program - this time, children's health insurance - with a tax on a powerless minority.

Let's leave aside the fact that the tobacco industry is untroubled by the fact that its best customers tend to be people with low incomes and relatively little education. Let's ignore the inconsistency of the industry's concern for poor people's financial troubles, which arises only when tobacco taxes are being discussed. And let's not bother to take the argument of tax regressiveness to its logical extreme, and suggest that tobacco taxes be eliminated - or, better yet, that poor people's cigarettes be subsidized through something like the food stamp program.

Instead, it's enough to point out that taxes are not the heaviest burden being borne by low-income smokers. The real burden is disease and death. Low-income people are more likely to suffer heart and lung disease, and to die prematurely, than those on higher rungs of the economic ladder. Smoking is a primary cause of the disparity. The health effects of smoking carry a social cost, including publicly funded health care, that is not fully recovered by tobacco taxes. Non-smoking taxpayers at all income levels can justifiably conclude that they already subsidize tobacco use.

Higher state and federal tobacco taxes are being proposed as a means of funding health insurance for low-income children. All the benefits of the tax will flow to people at the lower end of the economic scale, a disproportionate number of whom are smokers. In that sense, the burden of the tax is borne by the socioeconomic segment of the population that will receive the health services. If the tobacco companies were truly concerned with tax fairness, they'd complain that corporate chieftains would receive no benefit from a tax on their cigars.

Tobacco taxes do more than raise revenue. They also discourage tobacco consumption. For every increase of 10 percent in price, tobacco sales decline by 4 percent. Young people are especially sensitive to price. Most smokers become addicted before they turn 18 - before they're able to buy tobacco products legally, and while they'd still be covered by health insurance programs financed by tobacco taxes. In the long run, the greatest public health benefit from higher tobacco taxes may come in the form of reduced smoking rates rather than increased insurance coverage.

The tobacco companies sputter that steep increases in taxes will place such a heavy load on poor smokers that they'll quit in large numbers, and the state and federal governments will be left without enough revenue to finance health insurance for children.

That would be a wonderful problem to have. Some other means of paying for health insurance would need to be found, but any meaningful reduction in tobacco use would yield huge savings to the health care system.

Yes, tobacco taxes are regressive - but that's a smokescreen. What's really regressive is that the weight of tobacco addiction, with all its attendant costs and agonies, is disproportionately borne by the poor. The tobacco companies aren't complaining about that.