Unique occasion

Cigarette tax will improve health Guest writer

In the 2017 legislative session, the Arkansas Tax Reform and Relief Legislative Task Force was created. This group of legislators, chaired by Sen. Jim Hendren and Rep. Lane Jean, meet on a regular basis to evaluate our current tax structure and find opportunities to better the state, specifically our economy.

This task force understands its work will help our state attract new businesses, keep and expand existing industry, increase investment in Arkansas by companies around the world, and recruit and retain highly skilled and trained workers.

But the task force can do more than just change our state and economy: It can also dramatically improve Arkansans’ health. By increasing the state cigarette tax by $1.50 per pack, the task force could save 14,000 lives in our state and generate $121.3 million in new annual revenue—a unique opportunity to improve Arkansas’ well-being that we can’t afford to pass up.

The incidence of cancer, heart disease, stroke and respiratory disease in Arkansas is way too high. The common thread in these poor health statistics is tobacco use. Our state’s tobacco use has not improved at the same rate as the rest of the country. The adult smoking rate in Arkansas is the third-highest in the country at 23.6 percent, and our youth smoking rate is 13.7 percent, well above the national average.

In addition, we have the second-highest rate of smoking-related cancer deaths in the country—33.5 percent of cancer deaths in Arkansas are directly attributable to smoking. The most recently updated cancer-related statistics released by the federal government show that Arkansas outranks the country in newly diagnosed cases of lung cancer and lung cancer-related deaths.

How prevalent is lung cancer in Arkansas? One could combine the number of deaths related to leukemia, colorectal, female breast, prostate, pancreas, and liver/bile duct cancer and still not equal the number of lung cancer deaths.

In addition to the tremendous loss of life, the extensive use of tobacco in Arkansas is hurting our state financially, with more than $1.2 billion in annual health-care costs attributed to smoking, including nearly $300 million in Medicaid costs. Additionally, Arkansas experiences $1.7 billion in smoking-caused productivity losses annually.

As the task force examines ways to expand economic opportunity and prosperity in Arkansas—including by reducing individual and corporate income taxes, enhancing economic development incentives and evaluating the removal of sales-tax exemptions— it should also consider significantly increasing the cigarette tax.

The 2014 U.S. Surgeon General Report, “The Health Consequences of Smoking—50 years of Progress,” concludes that increases in the price of tobacco products, including those resulting from excise-tax increases, prevent initiation of tobacco use, promote cessation, and reduce the prevalence and intensity of tobacco use among youth and adults. In addition, every single state that has significantly increased its cigarette tax has experienced substantial increases in state revenue.

On June 20, I presented this information to the task force and asked the members to increase the tax on cigarettes by $1.50 per pack. Simply put, increasing the cigarette tax will save lives and help Arkansas thrive.

It is estimated that 26,900 adults in Arkansas who currently smoke would quit and 22,500 young people would be deterred from ever starting to smoke. Fourteen thousand lives would be saved and more than $1 billion in long-term health-care cost savings would result from the reduction in adult and youth smoking rates.

It is rare that our elected officials take the time to comprehensively study tax policy as this task force is doing. When it does, the most should be made of it, and every opportunity to improve our state must be explored. Increasing the cigarette tax will not only provide greater flexibility to improve our state’s tax structure, broaden the tax cuts for individuals and corporations, reduce the pressure to eliminate sales-tax exemptions, and enhance economic development incentives—it will protect our kids from deadly tobacco addictions and help people who smoke to quit.

Let’s take this opportunity to do more than improve our economy; let’s improve our health. Let’s raise the cigarette tax. —–––––❖–––––—