Tobacco: More powerful than capitalism?

Matt Yglesias thinks he has landed a blow against McCain over his newfound opposition to higher sin taxes on cigarettes:

. . . has McCain flip-flopped on any issues? Yes:

McCain now opposes sin taxes on cigarettes. He said he worries that Congress would put the additional money into a general revenue pool. "Does anyone here have confidence in Congress?" he asked the crowd. Moderator Paula Zahn was skeptical. Might McCain change his mind if researchers proved that raisng the tobacco tax would help lower smoking rates?

"It would have to be proved. I don 't think it's in the constitution of this Congress.” He hastened to add, “By the way, I’m not for anybody’s taxes.” He later implied that raising the cigarette tax would lead to more smoking as a way of explaining his decision not to support a Democratic attempt to use a tax hike to pay for more children’s health insurance.

So first McCain wants us to believe that he's so fanatically opposed to making public services more generous, that this is why he's opposed to raising cigarette taxes. Smoking is bad, says McCain, and it's important to promote public health by reducing its incidence. But it's even more important that we starve the government of funds for things like police and courts and infrastructure and health care and education and parks and the military than that we reduce the rate of smoking. Then, perhaps realizing that this is crazy, he turns around and asserts without evidence that higher cigarette taxes increase the rate of smoking.

Now all the evidence suggests that higher taxes lead to less smoking since, after all, what happens when the price of something goes up is that consumption goes down. But if this made-up fact were true, that would make McCain's position make sense, so why not just pretend it's true? After all, he's a straight-talker.

I would like nothing more than to count my blessings that Yglesias, a man of the Left, has called on the law of economic incentives like it was a verse of the Gospels, but in this particular case there's a good chance he's wrong. From NYT:



This graph doesn't show it, but the report from which the graph is pulled shows that the average rate of smoking in the nineties was only two points higher than it is now (26% to 24%), so things have been stalling for even longer than the graph suggests.

A final reason to back the Bush administration's opposition to further tobacco regulations (opposition which, in the case of expanding the FDA's jurisdiction, neither presidential candidate shares): it makes smokers cranky. We have the proof.