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As we will not be reminded when Independence Day arrives within the fortnight, our nation was founded by tobacco planters, suppliers for the very industry that our Congress was fighting against last week before the bill died.
The entire process has been enlightening, anyway. Earlier this year, many newspapers hereabouts carried a press release from our Republican congressman, Scott McInnis.
He proudly announced that he, too, was participating in the great tobacco crusade, and was doing his part by sponsoring a bill that limited the amount of money that attorneys could get from suing tobacco companies.
I live in the Third Congressional District, and hardly ever leave it (you need a good car and good weather to get out of the Third, which extends from San Luis to Maybell, from Cortez to Walden, from Grand Junction to Pueblo, across about 60,000 square miles).
Further, I devote many hours to examining the political pulse of the Third, associating on a daily basis with publicans, curmudgeons, gossips, scolds, unemployables and similar Everyday People from the Heartland of this Great Republic.
And during the past six months, they have mentioned water worries, development dilemmas, transportation traumas, clandestine city councils and a host of similar concerns.
Not one person, though, of whatever political
persuasion, has said Gee, those attorneys that sue the
tobacco companies are making out like bandits and I'm so
glad that our congressman is sponsoring legislation to put
a limit on their incomes.
Given that nobody here cares one whit about how much a plaintiff's attorney might exact in litigating against a tobacco company, and that McInnis has never been a big fan of income limitation if it might apply to John Malone or Phil Anschutz, why is he so enthusiastic about limiting the income of certain attorneys?
I finally asked an attorney. Trial lawyers are major
contributors to the Democratic Party,
he explained.
McInnis figures that if he cuts their income, they'll
have less to contribute, and that dries up the supply of
money to the Democrats, who already get considerably
outspent by the GOP.
So McInnis wasn't trying to serve his constituents or the national interest with his plain to reduce trial lawyers' incomes?
No, he was just carrying water for Newt's grand
scheme to make sure we have a one-party system in this
country.
But answers to other questions posed by the dead tobacco bill are harder to find.
For instance, one major feature was to reduce teen smoking by increasing cigarette taxes, which were going to fund all sorts of wonderful programs.
Now, if those programs rely on tobacco-tax money, and fewer people smoke, won't there be less money for the government programs?
And in that case, does the government start encouraging people to smoke, in order to finance the programs? Or does it raise tobacco taxes yet again, which will inspire a lively black market?
Are all those DEA snoops and thugs worried that the War on Drugs might abate, and so they're promoting an illicit market in tobacco, so they'll have lots of new laws to enforce? More possibility of corruption, more people to arrest, more prison construction and jobs for guards -- there could be something in this for everybody.
As for discouraging youth smoking, this sounds like a
plan conceived by the marketing department of some greedy
tobacco company. By positioning smoking as an adult
pastime, they make it really attractive to kids.
We graying Baby Boomers may look back at youth as a time of exuberance, but the truth is that nobody wants to be a kid. Kids come in gangs, plague shopping malls, loiter on street corners, receive rotten wages and working conditions, tote guns to school, cause trouble, pierce their tongues, dye their hair purple and tattoo their bodies -- kids abide at the absolute bottom of the current American social hierarchy.
Acquiring a stupid and dirty habit, especially if the
tobacco bill had passed, would be a way to say I'm not a
kid. Treat me with some respect.
Smokers may be
pariahs, but they still rank well above kids. As a way to
get teenagers hooked, the tobacco is for adults only
approach would work better than any dozen Joe Camels.
So any tobacco settlement goes to the courts now, instead of Congress. And who knows, maybe the tobacco companies will sue the states to recover the pension and medical costs the states saved from smokers who died early.
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