State dependence on tobacco tax revenue blocked a children’s health insurance bill

Evidence

In the United States this conflict erupted in the defeat of a Senate bill to fund health insurance for poor children with revenues from an increase in tobacco taxes. One of the arguments against the bill was that the tax would decrease smoking and thus reduce excise tax revenue to states. This argument led Senator Orrin Hatch to ask, “Does that mean that 419,000 Americans must die every year in order to preserve the state tobacco revenues?” (Clymer, 1997). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1700

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The perverse logic where revenues from the deadly product predicate funding the poor — a structural trap that resists the usual ‘morally bad actors’ framing because the harm is systemically embedded in the state’s own ledger.
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the addiction revenue trap’ — how governments come to depend on the very harms they purport to regulate, from tobacco to parking fines to policing.