I think one argument that resonated was that changing the state constitution to add a tax was a bad idea. (I thought not covering all those kids was a far worse idea, so I voted for Measure 50.) Perhaps not surprisingly, Olbermann & Moore didn't get into that issue.

I don't watch TV so I missed a lot of the advertising, but it seems to me that the arguments against went basically, "Sure, these kids need health care, but this isn't the way to do it." So at least maybe we've gotten a little further in drawing attention to (and support for) the idea that these kids do need health care. Kind of like how people said, "I'm OK with civil unions" as a defense against how they were bigoted to oppose gay marriage... helped get them used to thinking about civil unions in a new way, at least.

So Kevin, given that health insurance for kids is a good idea, how would you propose to fund it? As a not poor Oregonian, I would be willing to pay more taxes to fund this, but how would you suggest we go about it? There is no 'free lunch' in life as my dad always said......but what do you think would be a fairer way of paying for this that would stand a chance of passing?

My guess would be that it would take some idea that did not involve facing off against the multi-millions of dollars in ads by the tobacco companies.

According to official state statistics some 30% of those earning $15k or less per year smoke and would thus be footing the bill had M50 passed.

There is no evidence that those low income smokers would be "footing the bill". Its far more likely the tobacco companies would have footed the bill in reduced profits. The children they have addicted would just buy fewer cigarettes.

Good questions, Chris. I think a statutory cigarette tax for Healthy Kids might have passed had it been the first thing put forward by the legislature, but it would have been close. Given this outcome, however, I think that's no longer the case as attitudes have hardened as a result of the campaign. So where to go from here? I think the legislature won't touch a new tobacco tax next year, and maybe not the year after. When they are ready to do so, it should be raised the same amount as this would have, and dedicated solely to smoking cessation programs, which would be free to any Oregonian who wants to enroll.

As for insuring kids, that should now be rolled into the SB 329 health reform debate. The reform commission -- already in place -- should come up with a non-tobacco funding mechanism for covering kids. And as I mentioned elsewhere, Gov K should take immediate administrative action to enroll as many of the currently eligible children as possible.

By separating the two policy issues, we should be able to make progress on both.

As long as we do nothing as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer the children in Oregon will not have medical insurance. It's as simple as that.

I'm always astonished when the "progressives" decide to pick on a despised minority to fund a general issue, hitting the bottom of the economic scale. You propose to crush the blue collar wages farther in your pursuit of "kindness" to illegal aliens. Then you'll turn right around an bitch that those redneck assholes can't figure out what's good for them. Keeerist.

Kevin has told you repeatedly what was wrong with M50 and you just stuck your fingers in your ears. Now you were cheated by big tobacco, BS, those ads said RJR and Phillip Morris and nobody buys those outfits as bastions of truth, justice, and the American way. Maybe 40 years ago, not now. I smoke Camel straights - RJR - and I think they're liars, but their BS ad campaign doesn't change the facts Kevin and I and some others laid out for you. You presented lies and misdirection and you got whacked for your trouble.

Now lets work together to do something equitable about getting funding for kids health care, principles do count. You've got no room to whine after backing this piece of political cynicism and you've alienated some who should have been your allies - like me. And I'm damn alienated.

Far more likely that you know you haven't the faintest shred of evidence to back that up

The fact that your friends at the tobacco companies spent an awful lot of money to put your message out is more than a faint shred of evidence that they, at least, thought the money was going to come out of their pockets.

Or did you think those were public service announcements?

And I'm damn alienated.

You won - what do you have to alienated about? Go fix the problem you claim to care about. Until you do, every kid that fails to get health care is your fault.

So how do we craft an approach that offers fewer targets?

Not one that offers fewer targets, but one that has less powerful opponents. The money has to come from somewhere and this shows that kids health is not all that important. It can be set aside on a very thin pretext. It is not going to be that difficult to identify strong enough arguments against any proposal if you give people with enough money the motivation to do it.

The question is whether there is a realistic funding source with enough money that doesn't include powerful opponents.

These tax initiatives kill their profits

That is because there is a limit to how much people will spend on cigarettes. When taxes go up the tobacco companies either have to reduce their prices or lose business or a bit of both.

little did Olbermann know, the people who could actually vote on Measure 50 were unable to watch the program.

The 3-5% expected decrease in the number of smokers

The issue for the tobacco companies is not only how many smokers there are but how much people smoke. Demonstrating again how thin a shred of evidence is required for people to adopt the tobacco companies' position. Again, where is the evidence that low income smokers were going to be paying a disproportionate portion of the taxes. It does not seem to exist.

Kevin -

You have three links there. Not one of them analyzes where the money from the Oregon tax will come from. You just leap from poor people smoke to the money for kids health care would have come from poor people spending more money.

That is "no evidence". You might as well claim they paid for the campaign against the measure. Of course they did in one sense, the money the tobacco companies spent came out of their pockets. But I would bet the tobacco companies don't raise their prices to recover the cost of "protecting the oregon constitution". And they wouldn't have raised their prices to recover all the increased taxes they pay on tobacco either.

That's the proponents' own figures.

Well no, that is you cherry-picking data to prove a different point than the one he made. Here is what the actual article you are using says said:

While existing tobacco taxes are regressive, increases in these taxes can be progressive given that smoking among low income persons will fall sharply in response to the higher taxes, while smoking among those with higher incomes will fall by less.

He then does his analysis of this question and after siting several studies:

"I conservatively estimate that the price responsiveness of smoking among low-income persons in Oregon is 1.5 times that of the overall population, implying that a ten percent price increase will reduce cigarette consumption among low-income persons by six percent."

Notice the comment on conservative. None of the studies he sites found anything lower than twice the overall population.

"several empirical studies finding that smoking among lower-income populations is much more responsive to price than smoking among higher-income populations (USDHHS, 2000; Chaloupka, et al. 2000; Chaloupka, in press). Farrelly and his colleagues (2001), for example, estimate that smoking in US households below the median income level is four times more responsive to changes in cigarette prices than is smoking in households with incomes above the median."

As Kevin makes clear, the real price paid by low income smokers isn't money, its in fewer smokes. Its really a question of putting their cigarettes ahead of kids health. And that is not really surprising, it is the nature of addiction.

What is appalling is that so many people bought into that .

It's self-evident where the money would have come from.

No it isn't.

30% of Oregonians earning less than $15k per year smoke versus 11% of Oregonians earning $50k or more per year smoke

So what? The question is who will pay the extra money. It may well be that those rich folks will and the poor folks will just cut back on smoking.

It appears that is the problem. You care more about your next smoke than you do about children's health care. That is what addiction will do to you.

It is a pity Measure 50 was defeated and yes, the millions spent by tobacco interests played a huge role in its defeat. However, I would argue that progressives had already tilled the ground that made the anti-50 argument flourish so effectively. In the last decade, how many times have campaigns argued against a ballot measure not on the merits, but on the premise that constitutional amendments are improper and extreme? Certainly the right is deceitful and hypocritical in arguing against constitutional amendments when they are responsible for a series of them in past years, but pointing that out just highlights our own hypocrisy.

Hopefully one lesson we can learn from this is to look beyond the immediate campaign to our long terms goals and quit making short-term arguments of expediency that will only be impediments to our long-term goals.

Hopefully one lesson we can learn from this is to look beyond the immediate campaign to our long terms goals and quit making short-term arguments of expediency that will only be impediments to our long-term goals.

Ruth, one of my long-term goals is to keep crap from the right AND the left out of the constitution. I voted for M50, but it bugged the hell out of me to do so. Hopefully one lesson that Merkley and Brown learned from this defeat is that just because Republicans block the good policies we're trying to pass doesn't mean we should send bad policies to the voters.

Ruth...ever since the OCA tried to put hate crap into the constitution in the early 90's, I have always voted no on any and all attempts to amend the constitution...regardless of any merit the measure has. The constituion is a blueprint to interperet the law - not be the law. If you want it to be the law, make it a statute. If M50 passed, we would have healthy kids, but they would not have a constituion left to protect them because M50 would start a landslide of other garbage measures into the constitution - eventually rendering it useless beyond repair, and making it only a glorified paragraph on the ORS. The message of the NO vote was clear: "Legislators - PLEASE do your job that we sent you to do in Salem and never again dump this onto your voters and constituents to decide for you".

I understand, I voted against it as well for all of the reasons given. My position on 50 is that if we all think children's healthcare is necessary - and it most assuredly is - then we all should be willing to pay for it. I'm a smoker, I don't drink but I would have been just as opposed to it if the means of paying for it was a liquor tax. Going the "sin tax" route is political cowardice to me - if the program in question is that vital then the tax pain is worth sharing with a general tax increase and having to defend that. We don't make Hispanics pay a special tax for services for them, or blacks pay a special tax for services for them - making any minority pay a special tax is just as unfair as those would be. In the long run, we all benefit from having future taxpayers' health taken care of when they're kids and the cost of that benefit should be shared the same way.

One ugly by-product of the measure being aimed for the State Constitution was having people here (some of whom I'd expected better sense) arguing that our Constitution was already a garbage dump full of pet projects, undeserving of any reverence and unrespected by the electorate. I suppose they'd forgotten the fate of the elections-reform measures 46 & 47 in the last election: the enabling Constitutional Amendment was defeated largely on account of concerns over its effect on the unfettered free-speech clause.

This is the crux of your "evidence"

No Eric, its not the crux of any evidence. You are the one claiming the money for kids will come from "low income smokers". The evidence is all over the place that "low income smokers" are, in fact, more price conscious than their wealthier addicts. They are more likely to quit or smoke less when the price goes up instead of spending more money. That means a large portion of the money for kids health care was going to come out of tobacco company profits.

The fact is the folks that voted against this measure voted to destroy children's lives. The reasons given for that indicate an incredible lack of balance. "I would have had to smoke less" and "I didn't want to add to the pages of crap that are already in the Oregon constitution" are pretty thin gruel.

Of course there were plenty of people who also thought "If there parents can't pay for it, tough. That's the way the world should work." But those arguments weren't going to win the day and the tobacco companies knew it. So they needed to add a bunch of fluff to cover pseudo-progressive's own callousness. So we have "low income smokers" as "victims" of a nefarious plot to make them pay for kids health care when the only real effect would be they might smoke less.

And they pitch people, who are more concerned with theoretical pontificating than kids health, in the civil rights community about some abstract protection of a state constitution already loaded with tax code. That includes the provisions that caused this to be a constitutional amendment in the first place.

It was obvious the tobacco companies were going to win or they wouldn't have been spending all that money. They knew which voters' strings to pull and how to pull them. But they also knew that children's health care was not really a problem those folks saw as critical in their lives. It was just another abstract political issue to be debated on Blue Oregon.

They didn't need to show anyone would die if the measure passed. They didn't need to show how people's lives would be made miserable. They really didn't need to balance the lives of those kids with any tangible outcomes. Because the lives of those kids didn't really matter to the nicotine addicts and progressive political thinkers they were targeting.

I am no believer in unilateral disarmament. The reason Msr 50 required constitutional change is because of the constitutional changes effected by the right. Our state Constitution is not sacrosanct and could use more than one fix, including repealing some of the measures that so hamstring the legislature and made them so ineffective. I also cannot see voting against something that you want just because you don't like how it gets there, that is the very definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face...except that it's not your nose, its the nose of all the children without health care.