Bloomberg’s Addiction

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

City Councilmember James Gennaro suggested yesterday that testimony from the Bloomberg administration in respect of the legal age for tobacco purchases might as well have been written by the city’s finance department. Mr. Gennaro certainly seems to have a point. He is one of the cosponsors of a bill in the Council to raise the minimum age an individual must attain before buying cigarettes. Mr. Gennaro’s bill would raise the age to 19 from 18, while a competing bill would raise the age to 21.

The mayor opposes both these provisions, and we agree with him, or rather, he agrees with us that more regulation isn’t the answer to whatever public policy problem smoking poses. But, not to look a gift horse in the mouth, the question is, why? Mr. Bloomberg is a Johnny-come-lately to our more laissez-faire view of smoking, and it’s hard to square his opposition to these latest legislative efforts with his earlier banning smoking in bars and jacking up the cigarette excise collected by the city, not to mention his pursuit of those who tried to provide some tax competition by buying untaxed cigarettes on the Internet.

Unless, that is, the testimony of the city health department’s assistant commissioner for tobacco control, Sarah Perl, really was drafted by the city’s finance department. Cigarette taxes, which currently add $3 in state and city excise plus sales tax to the cost of a pack, are big business. The city in August ratcheted efforts to extract $6.95 million in unpaid taxes from just 16,000 New Yorkers who had bought smokes from just one Internet site. Could it possibly be the revenue protection is the mayor’s motive in opposing a raising of the age at which one can buy a cigarette — i.e., that he’s addicted to tobacco revenues?

No other explanation makes sense. Ms. Perl argued, for example, that higher legal age requirements haven’t reduced teen smoking in other jurisdictions that have tried the tack. But then why bother to enforce any minimum smoking age if clearly people who fall below the minimum will find ways to get cigarettes anyway? Even more bizarrely, Ms. Perl seemed to argue that another problem with the proposals would be that after they were enacted, some people who had previously been able to purchase cigarettes legally would be saddled with addictions they would no longer be able to satisfy. By this logic, one might as well pack it in with all anti-drug measures.

The real reason to oppose the City Council legislation is that there is no reason to restrict the sale of cigarettes to legal adults, who should be free to make the trade-off between perfect health and enjoyment in smoking. If politicians like Mr. Bloomberg believed as much as they claim to in the dangers of cigarettes, they would ban them outright.Instead, the political class tries to profit from them. Mr. Bloomberg’s wrongheaded arguments on the right side of this particular issue serve only to point up just how muddled — or cynical — his other tobacco policies have been.


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