©RJ Matson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

At first glance, Amendment 3 that increases the state tobacco tax may seem like a good way to make up for the shortfall in dollars needed to fund the Medicaid program for low-income Missouri families.

But this proposal offers neither the right plan, the right tax or the right vision.

Missourians for Tax Justice opposes this flawed proposal. We urge citizens to vote NO on Amendment 3 on November 7, 2006.

This proposed tobacco tax increase violates the major principle of a just tax system: Taxes should be based on the ability to pay. This regressive tax increase would make our state tax system even more inequitable. Already, the lowest income Missourians have a tax burden that is twice that of the wealthiest.

Tobacco taxes are regressive. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports that cigarette taxes are about ten times more burdensome for low-income taxpayers than for the wealthy.

Because this proposal is in the form of a state constitutional amendment, it violates the most basic, commonsense definition of the purpose of a constitution. The constitution is meant to be a statement of only the most fundamental rules and principles of government that broadly determine the powers and duties of government and guarantee certain rights of the citizens.

It is an abuse of the constitution (or even the notion of a constitution) to use it as a budgeting tool — that is the roll of state legislators through the budgeting and appropriations processes. It is particularly harmful to embed the constitution with multiple give-aways to special interests that likely do not serve the greater common good of all Missourians and certainly do not provide funding adequate to solve the real revenue problems of our state.

This proposal locks in both the taxes and the way the revenue is used. As a constitutional amendment, it would make our tax system even more inflexible. None of these funds, or any interest that accrues on them, goes to the state’s General Revenue Fund which pays for the changing needs of Missouri citizens.

The proposal’s plans for use of the funds would not meet the needs for Medicaid funding, but could serve to create a false impression that it would bail out Medicaid. It is especially offensive to pretend that regressive tax schemes solve the problems of health care for the poor, when in fact, measures such as this tax will at the same time cause greater economic burden for low-income and poor persons who are addicted to nicotine.

Popularity of the tobacco tax is often because it’s a tax that someone else pays. This tax proposal targets persons addicted to tobacco use. Instead of all of us paying taxes (based on our ability to pay) as an investment in our society, it is easier to put the responsibility on some segment of our society of which we’re not a part.

Tobacco users are scorned because that’s easier than trying to understand and treat their addiction. The state has failed to use any of the “tobacco settlement” funds it has received to help tobacco users quit. Of the uses specified for the new tobacco tax funds, this proposal allocates the fewest dollars to prevention, education and cessation efforts.

If passed, this measure would put us well down the road to ever more attempts by special and big money interests to use the process of the initiative to permanently embed their private welfare in our public constitution, at the expense of the greater good. The arguments for this proposal show the lack of vision needed to grasp the big picture. They demonstrate the lack of a thorough analysis of the revenue problems faced by our state and recognition of the true scope and magnitude of need.

Without comprehensive equitable tax revision and increased revenues, Missouri will not be able to undo the damage of the last five years that has reduced state higher education funding by about 20% in real terms, cut 100,000 working poor people off state health care, dropped state worker salaries to the lowest in the nation, underfunded the current school formula by nearly $900 million and led to the school funding lawsuit.

Adoption of this proposal would make it harder to make the changes in Missouri’s inadequate, inequitable and outdated tax system that are greatly needed to meet all the funding needs for our citizens — dollars for education, social services of all kinds and other basic needs, as well as Medicaid.

MTJ urges citizens to oppose this misguided state constitutional amendment.

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Note: The cartoon at the top of this page was published before the "compromise" tobacco tax amendment proposal was adopted. However, it still tells an unavoidable truth about this initiative petition proposal.