Last rant on the smoking prevention act (for now)

Remember the Master Tobacco Settlement back in the 1990s? One of the rationales for this legislative extortion was the money would fund smoking prevention programs. Here is a graph from the campaign for smoke free kids. This group supported the smoking prevention act even though they have proof on their website that the states did not use their funds for cessation programs. Where did the money go? Wherever the state legislatures felt like spending it. Not unlike President Obama's campaign chat with Joe the Plumber. Obama wanted to "spread the wealth". A nice vague statement that can easily be sidestepped and revised ad nauseam later.

Spending Graph

The smaller parts of the graph are the amounts the states spent on their smoking cessation programs. The larger one is the amounts states received from the Master Tobacco Settlement and their current tobacco sales and excise taxes. You need a magnifying glass for the spending on smoking prevention programs. You can see the receipts from Tobacco taxes from across a large sized room. Do the math and you will see the states spent less than $7 billion over a 10 year period. During the same 10 year period they received over $200 billion. When politicians receive over $20 billion a year, they are not going to kill the goose that lays this many golden eggs. That is why the smoking prevention programs get such a small percentage of the tax receipts that tobacco generates.

To learn more about how we are doing on smoking cessation, visit Campaign for smoke free kids, just click here