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Tuesday, February 01, 2000 Page: 6A
A recent SAYSO caller (Jan. 23) asked, “Why does a family who has no
children in a school district have to pay school taxes? This is like paying
cigarette taxes even though you don’t smoke.” This is a classic case of
comparing apples and oranges. Here’s why:
Imposing school taxes on all property owners benefits society by promoting
equal educational opportunities and helping to create an educated and informed
citizenry. Imposing cigarette taxes on nonsmokers would harm society by
subsidizing a voluntary activity that is harmful and addictive.
Imposing school taxes on all property owners provides significant indirect
benefits even to families without children, because these taxes help to create
a better educated, and thus more competent and productive, workforce and
better informed citizens and voters. Imposing cigarette taxes on nonsmokers
would provide few, if any, indirect benefits to nonsmokers.
It’s fair to require cigarette smokers to pay cigarette taxes, because
smokers impose economic and health costs on the rest of society in the form of
higher insurance premiums, increased Medicare costs, lost work days, health
risks from second-hand smoke, etc. It would not be fair to require nonsmokers
to pay cigarette taxes, because this would force nonsmokers to subsidize a
costly and unhealthy activity that doesn’t benefit them and that they bear no
personal responsibility for.
In short, there are very good reasons for levying affordable school taxes
even on families that derive no immediate, short-term benefit from public
education. There are no good reasons for imposing cigarette taxes on
nonsmokers.
Greg Bassham
Mountaintop