California voters narrowly reject new tobacco tax
Source: Associated Press
A closely-watched effort to impose a new tax on tobacco to pay for cancer research in the nation's most populous state has failed by less than a percentage point after remaining too close to call for more than two weeks.
The measure failed by 50.3 percent to 49.7 with about 5 million votes cast, The Associated Press determined Friday. The measure was losing by about 27,000 votes with 150,000 ballots remaining to be counted; too few for the `yes' side to pull ahead.
Lighting up the airwaves with campaign ads, the tobacco industry was able to cut support for a $1-a-pack cigarette tax backed by cycling legend Lance Armstrong from a two-thirds majority in March to a dead heat on Election Day.
... Opponents of the measure, which would have used tax revenue to fund cancer research, raised $47 million to fight it, a large haul for even the most heated state races. By comparison, Jerry Brown spent about $36 million in his successful 2010 bid to become governor of California and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his allies spent $47 million to beat back his recall challenge.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/06/19/national/a121829D84.DTL&tsp=1
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Get your own house in order instead of picking what you thought was a "no-brainer, slam-dunk" tax.
I'm surprised they didn't call it a "fee", it probably would have passed.
Cancer reasearch ?? Bullshit. What did they do with all the money they won a few years ago? They did the same as Florida did, they pissed it away ! This would have had the same end.
I say "GOOD ON YA" for the majority of Californians.
Last edited Sun Jun 24, 2012, 03:47 PM - Edit history (1)
You are going to punish every single person in public service (and every single person who benefits from public goods and services) because Reagan bought some gold plated hammers and toilet seats back in the 80s? Because Bush II lost billions in mismanagement in Iraq? Let me tell you something. When the money was lost in Iraq, it was lost forever. So you are going to punish today's people on Medicaid and Social Security and Food Stamps because you decide that some past government wasted money? How does that make sense? That money is gone and it ain't coming back.
There has to be "another chance" -- that is the nature of budgets. There is a new one every year. And to say to the government "I was wrong to trust you with something important" is to give up on government entirely. That is the essence of the Tea Party. We need public goods and public services--but the Tea Party thinks we don't, and they don't want to contribute to them. If we refuse to contribute our tax money to support those things, we will live in an ever deteriorating country that will look more and more like a third world country every day.
And yes we do need new taxes. We pay less taxes than at any other time since WWII. We pay less taxes than any other developed country. And we wonder why we have crappy public services? There is no way to make them better without the money they have not been getting for these things for years, while service and infrastructure have been deteriorating.
1. The government has collected less in taxes as a proportion of the economy in the past three years than it has in any three-year period since World War II, and tax rates are at historic lows.
2. One out of three multi-millionaires pays a lower percentage of their income in taxes than the vast majority of people making $60,000 a year.
3. Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, which has been praised by Governor Romney, would deliver benefits to people with incomes over $1 million that are 10 times greater than the benefits to those earning $40,000 or less.
4. Corporate income taxes for the past three years have hovered at just over 1 percent of GDP, lower than for any three-year period since World War II. The average for OECD countries is 3.5 percent.
5. The Bush tax cuts added $1.7 trillion to the nation’s debt between 2001 and 2008, which is more than it would cost to send 25 million kids to four-year public universities.
6. America has a revenue problem, not a spending problem. It is only because of the Bush tax cuts that our national debt is rising. If not for those cuts, our debt would be stabilized at under 60 percent of GDP.
7. General Electric, which reported over $4 billion in US profits in 2010, paid ZERO taxes.
8. A financial speculation tax of only 0.50 percent on financial trades could raise up to $170 billion annually.
9. Upper income households save an average of $5,500 thanks to the mortgage interest tax deduction whereas families earning between $40,000 and $75,000 save only $500.
10. Only two OECD nations collect less revenue as a percentage of GDP than the United States—Chile and Mexico.
http://prospect.org/article/top-ten-tax-facts
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/are-taxes-in-the-u-s-high-or-low/
And PS, I work 60 hours a week, and you and I both know that even the richest person in America brings home far more than 10% of his or her income. The US long ago abandoned the 90% take bracket and even then, it only taxed income at a certain amount at the 90% rate. No one in the history of the United States has ever paid 90% of his or her whole income in taxes, but we can discuss how tax brackets work in another post if you are interested.
"to hurt themselves." Less than 20% of Americans smoke, and most people never would have paid the tax. As for me, I think the vote is indicative of the ascendancy of the Tea Party, of the "no money for government, ever" POV. Why else would anyone oppose taxes they'll never have to pay?
Your question presupposes that we are already overburdened by taxes, and one more straw will break the camel's back. It's simply not true. We paid higher tax rates in the 90s, under Clinton, and nobody talked about being overburdened by taxes. The economy wasn't perfect, but it grew, we created jobs, and the federal government had a surplus. Hell, I'd take the rates under Nixon, Kennedy, or Reagan, too. Under none of those rates were taxes repressive, and they were all well within my "personal limit," assuming I have one.
