It was always a given that President Joe Biden was shucking reality when he claimed his massive partisan spending plan could be implemented for zero additional costs, but that wasn’t the only whopper Biden has been pushing.
His oft repeated and wholly fanciful promise that anyone making less than $400,000 a year would never see a tax increase has gone completely up in smoke.
The current version of Biden’s misleadingly-entitled “Build Back Better” proposal includes steep tax increases on a whole assortment of tobacco products, most of which are almost assuredly used by the very folks Biden promised would never see a tax increase, reported the Tax Foundation:
Biden’s tobacco tax would, “raise the almost $100 billion by doubling rates on cigarettes and increasing rates on all other tobacco and nicotine products to achieve parity with the new rate on cigarettes. Doubling the cigarette tax rate yields a high rate, but tax parity across all products results in increases on other tobacco products that are significantly higher.
The rate on chewing tobacco increases more than 2,000 percent, and the rates on pipe tobacco and snuff over 1,600 percent each. Vapor products, which have not been taxed at the federal level thus far, would be taxed at a rate of $100.66 per 1,810 mg of nicotine. That equals a federal tax on a regular pod-based product of roughly $2.25 per pod—more than the new federal $2.01 rate on a pack of cigarettes).
The proposed tobacco tax doesn’t include an exemption for people making less than $400K a year. In fact, just the opposite is true, with lower income taxpayers bearing the heaviest hit.
“As a source of general fund revenue, the tax is exceedingly regressive,” noted the Tax Foundation. “The vast majority of smokers have lower incomes, and tobacco is one of the few goods that have an inverse relationship with income in that consumption increases as income decreases.”
And it’s not just lower income earners that Biden is targeting with his tobacco tax, according to National Review:
“Doubling the cigarette tax is a tax that disproportionately effects the least educated and poorest Americans and will also disproportionately hit gays and lesbians, those on Medicaid, and the uninsured.”
The misguided proposal is almost certain to also hit any businesses, or workers, with ties to tobacco, a fact not missed by Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, who said the tax would “devastate” farmers in his state and put “at risk hundreds of well-paying union jobs in our communities.”
“Based on information I have seen, Kentucky tobacco farmers and businesses stand to forfeit an estimated $51 million in lost revenue under the proposal,” Beshear wrote. “The total estimated negative economic impact in the commonwealth could reach as high as $65 million, including 295 fewer jobs, $11. 6 million in lost wages and $28.8 million less in state and local revenue.”
In other words, just another reckless tax-and-spend scheme cooked up by Biden and his so-called progressive cronies.
