While doing little to reduce smoking or vaping
Pesident Joe Biden during his 2020 campaign vowed not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 a year. That promise recently hit an iceberg in the form of a new excise tax on nicotine.
Kentucky Congressman John Yarmuth inserted the tax into the tome-like Build Back Better Plan bill last week. Yarmuth’s amendment appears to focus on e-cigarettes, vape juice, and other non-tobacco items by classifying them as extracted nicotine products with a max levy of over $50. That’s like the current tobacco tax. It’s unknown how much revenue Yarmuth hopes to raise, though the original Build Back Better Plan included $96 billion in tobacco and e-cigs taxes.
Any nicotine tax will hit the lower and middle classes harder than anyone else. The CDC said in 2018 that at least 17 percent of U.S. adults in the “poor” or “near poor” categories used vapes or e-cigarettes, with most of them between 18 and 44 years old. A combined average of 10.5 percent of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians vape. It’s worth noting that e-cigarette use dropped last year after the federal government tightened regulations, while cigarette use increased for the first time in two decades. This could mean that nicotine users are now switching back to tobacco products due to their availability, quite the unintended consequence.
Taylor Millard – Spectator World – 2021-11-16.
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