The apocalyptic news keeps rolling in. The state is proposing a half billion in education cuts to make room for the state’s $2.8 billion budget deficit, according to The Detroit News. This includes the Promise Grants, a program that provides 96,000 college students with $4,000 over four years. The cuts, symptomatic of a crumbling economy, even include an elimination of school bus inspections. This recent round of cuts, while depressing, is par for Michigan, arguably the most depressed state in a depressed union.
With the elimination of the Promise Grants, the Michigan Competitive Scholarships, and with deep cuts in many other scholarships and subsidies, the very idea of a college education is once again becoming an option only to those who can afford it — or those willing to shackle themselves to unbelievable amounts of debt.
Intelligence and talent aren’t just for into the rich and upper-middle class. If we continue, as a society, to say no to low-income children who choose learning and tell them they are less deserving of higher education because of their inherited social status, we all lose. We forfeit the untapped potential of inventions, formulas, designs, ideas, cures for cancer, great-tasting energy drinks, etc.
The recession has shuttered many small businesses, and caused its share of personal bankruptcies effectively destroying an already weak tax base. So, if we want to save our scholarships and provide equal opportunity delaying the death of the American Dream by another generation, where will the money come from? Putting financial aid aside, if we want our government to function, our firehouses ready and our police walking the beat, again, where will the money come from?
Conservatives loathe income taxes, and Texas congressman Ron Paul, who falls somewhere along the conservative-libertarian continuum, advocate repealing the income tax and replacing it with a consumption tax on most goods and services purchased by any American, regardless of income — also known as a sin taxsomething similar to a sin tax.
For those who smoke or know someone who smokes, you know the average price of cigarettes has increased about a dollar from last year in Michigan. This was, in our Lansing legislators’ minds, one of the best ways to make a quick buck and settle some budget shortfalls before the end of the fiscal year. It is all well and good to a certain point. The government taxes plenty of specific things; lcohol, yachts and human life — the estate tax, inheritance tax, or the death tax, take your pick.
I even enjoy the argument that taxing cigarettes makes sense as a financial punishment. We all know cigarettes cause a host of illnesses, from emphysema to lung cancer, and these illnesses eventually cost us all in the form of health care bills paid by taxes. So, it follows that those who freely choose to make themselves sick should pick up more of the tab in the form of higher taxes on the offending items.
The problem is that train of thought can’t just end there. Because our state is in such dire need of tax revenues, this increase on cigarettes has two faces. The first is a moral admonishment of smokers, or bad people who should pay for filling the air with their dirty poisons; the second is the underlying premise that more people should start smoking.
This is why sin taxes are a bad, shortsighted idea, and the logical underpinnings come undone. With the introduction of sin taxes, the government, for the first time, now has an actual incentive for people to continue this behavior. Public coughers now fund the public coffers.
If people claim this penalty will be used as a deterrent to smoking, why doesn’t the government tax all things it finds sinful, such as prostitution or drugs? Well, the short answer is if they did so, within five years there would be prostitution lobbyists in Washington, D.C.
While using cigarettes and alcohol to pay teachers’ salaries has a certain poetic justice to it, it is bothersome that a destitute government will become reliant on these vices to fund itself. The role of government is to use its power to help build long-term economic growth, among other things.
And since our government has failed to do so, Granholm has become the person at a crowded bar who just bums cigarettes from everyone. In fact, if Michigan legislators make smoking in bars illegal just before winter hits, they are really just hurting their bottom line. Or perhaps we’ve yet to see Michigan’s latest public service announcent: “Don’t smoke — gamble!”
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