Prop 86: Tobacco, but not Big Macs?
California’s Proposition 86 is a prime example of using emotional buzzwords to induce voters to stop thinking and follow the jargon trail like sheep. Helen Beebe of Simi Valley wrote an emotional and passionate editorial for today’s Ventura County Star calling for Californians to vote for Proposition 86 as a way to “fight back against the tobacco industry.”
She goes on to say :
The money that will come from Proposition 86 has been assigned to assist with a variety of health concerns. Tobacco education and cessation is one area of concern.
Let’s be clear: They intend to tax tobacco products to pay for unrelated health concerns. There is no oversight to how the money is spent and there is no accountability to anyone for how the funds are allocated.
But Helen glosses over that and calls us all to action in her final paragraph:
Proposition 86 is about saving lives! It is about keeping children from ever starting the addictive smoking habit. It is about increasing the availability of public health services for everyone. It is about creating a healthier California for all of us!
Baloney. Proposition 86 is about everything but saving lives. It is about shoving agendas down people’s throats, funding programs which would not otherwise be eligible for funding, and backdoor social engineering. If it were a computer virus it would be classified as a worm, spreading and infecting as many as possible.
If it were about saving lives, proponents would be slapping a $2.60 tax on Big Macs, or candy, or ice cream, since obesity is the number one killer and cause of health expenditures in the US.
If it were about saving lives, proponents would be directing the funds toward life-saving research.
But it’s not about saving lives; it is about an anti-tobacco agenda permitted to run amok.
If you’re comfortable with the idea of seeing this type of a tax on convenience foods or condoms or the Internet, or whatever the next target of the tax-em-Nazis might be, then by all means, vote for it. But success with a measure like this really means failure of a system in this country that has served us well for more than 200 years and one whose revolution began, in part, because of unfair and burdensome taxes for which the people saw no benefit.
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