NZ tax plans morally questionable

The Taxpayers’ Union is labelling the New Zealand government’s decision to raise taxes on cigarettes by 10 percent each year for the next four years as morally questionable, according to a Scoop story.

The union’s executive director, Jordan Williams, was quoted as saying that smokers already paid more than three times the health costs of their habit.

And he made the point that penalising people for voluntarily choosing a damaging habit was morally questionable when the very people who paid were those who could least afford it. But governments always ‘needed’ more money and public health was a convenient excuse.

“The socioeconomic make up of tobacco consumers means that these higher taxes land on those who can least afford it,” said Williams. “It means the budget is giving with one hand but taking with the other.”

As the union had asked numerous times, Williams said, if the government were genuine about reducing smoking rates – and was not also influenced by the extra tax dollars – why hadn’t it legalized electronic cigarettes, which had been estimated by Public Health England to be at least 90 percent less harmful than are traditional tobacco cigarettes and were Britain’s number one smoking cessation tool?

The Taxpayers’ Union research paper on tobacco excise tax: Passive Income, How the government uses smokes as cash cows, is available at: http://taxpayers.org.nz/passive_income.