I really think taxing tobacco is the way to go. As someone who grew up with a parent who smoked I repeatedly was annoyed at being exposed to the nasty smell. Taxes on Tobacco don't go far enough however, we need to get rid of it all together. While I think additional taxes on tobacco is great step, and a necessary step. We really ought to make it child abuse to expose a child to smoke. I have no mercy for a drug that kills people when it is used exactly as intended.

If anything we should at least raise our taxes to equalize with Washington's tobacco tax to discourage smokers over there too.

The NO-on-50 TV ads are outright deceptive lies put on by the tobacco trolls as some put it. I don't have any children but I want more of our state's children to be cared for. Just because it won't help you directly doesn't mean it isn't in everyone's interest. I know many families who would benefit from having health care access for their children. The constitutional argument is irrelevant, if the republicans didn't hate children so much they would have let us pass it as a statute last session. They were probably doing what the tobacco industry told them to do by forcing it to be a constitutional amendment referral. You know folks, we could always change it later!! Especially after we toss out these worthless republicans and get our majority.

I'm already on record admitting that I am a smoker and that I don't have a problem with a sin tax as M50 is. It's bad policy because it doesn't pay for itself. In a year or two it will take ever increasing funds from the general fund to pay for its excesses. That's the actual argument. We should legalize majrijuana and tax its use, and hookers should pay a percentage for every trick. I agree! But lets not adopt bad policy on these grounds.

Why do opponents of M50 refuse to recognize that the non partisan economists say that the tax will pay for the health care program?

And so what if smoking does go down so much that the state has to either find some more funding or cut back on the program. Is that bad? Don't these same opponents want a more broadbased responsibility for funding the program anyway? So wouldn't decreased smoking actually solve one of the problems they cite?

Don't people realize that if smoking goes down other state expenditures on health care will go down (freeing up more public dollars) and all of our insurance rates will go down (freeing up more of my dollars)

There is simply no downside to M50, unless you're a tobacco company.

Confused by the moral outrage?

Well, I will likely offend some people with this, but much of the opposition to M50 I've read here is bitching, plain and simple. Bitching is finding something, anything to complain about regardless of reality. Bitch that the tax is too high. Bitch that the tax is too low. Bitch that tobacco tax is being used to buy health insurance. Bitch that all the tobacco tax is not being used to buy health insurance. Bitch that smokers will not be able to afford their habits. Bitch that the tax will make no difference in smokers' habits. Bitch that the health programs will be too expensive for the revenue stream. Bitch that the health programs are not covering everyone for every conceivable need. Bitching is easy. It's about attitude, not reason. It's especially easy when a wealthy industry pays crafty PR people to formulate every possible bitch and spread them around like snot producing viruses. It takes only one successful bitch infection to make a "NO" voter out of someone with a predisposition to dislike taxes, or social programs, or politicians, or government in general. And once infected, victims are likely to spread the bitch to other susceptible voters.

Politics can be a real bitch sometimes.

Your statement "We use taxes to shape behavior all the time" is a drastic oversimplification of the objection. Yes, we shape behavior all the time, but that doesn't mean that either a) all your examples are the same kind of shaping behavior or b) that this particular tax is the thing we want right now. Measure 50 isn't so much imperfect as it is fundamentally flawed. It has one huge benefit: insuring kids (note: not caring for them, insuring them. good, but not the best). It has many downsides: increasing the tax on cigarettes (we already disincentivize this enough, some of us feel), getting around the 3/5ths requirement by sending a "feel-good" measure to the people (how come we couldn't have spent money on kids health insurance first rather than leaving it to last so we could send it to the people? Oh, right, it's hard to send things that don't carry stridency to the people) and lastly, the very stridency of its supporters.

Many of us who oppose it are opposing it because of subtle reasons. I'm very close to the fence, but I think it's overall a little bit worse for us than it is better. But the arguments in favor do a good job demonizing me.