June 25, 2005
Akron Beacon Journal -- 'Cigarette tax has smokers fuming mad'
"Of course, it's easy for politicians to raise taxes on cigarettes because there isn't much resistance from the general public.
"'Smokers are a minority and their number is shrinking,' said Richard E. Wagner, an economics professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., who has studied cigarette taxes. ``They are largely working-class people, which also suggests they have less political influence. If smokers were largely professional people, I suspect they would be taxed less heavily even if their share of the population was the same.''
He published the paper State Excise Taxation: Horse-and-Buggy Taxes in an Electronic Age last month for the Washington-based Tax Foundation. The paper -- available at www.taxfoundation.org -- is highly critical of states' reliance on excise taxes because revenue estimates are rarely met."
