All right, now before we get started I want you all to know three things. First this is not about smoking and cigarettes but about taxes and socialism. Next, I am not advocating the use of tobacco in any form nor am I taking sides in the debate on smoking. And third, I don't want to hear about how as a Christian you love your neighbors, as long as they don't smoke, nor do I want to hear about how smokers have been discriminated against. Save it all for one of the many forums on these subjects found elsewhere.

What I do want to talk about is the mixed up, double talking, triple looped, side winding, backhanded, hypocritical, and downright dumb 'plan' that Obama and his Socialists have come up with concerning a new tax on tobacco and the use of those taxes. It is a plan so zany that I doubt if even Groucho, Chico, and Harpo could have concocted on one of their best days with Zeppo singing about 'Duck Soup' in the background. I want to talk about this because it is a microcosm of Obama's inexperience, his administration, his economic recovery plan and his Socialist agenda. We need to examine and understand this tobacco tax because what is going on now with tobacco will be repeated throughout his administration on just about everything we Americans use or buy in the coming years. What is happening with this tobacco tax is exactly what is going to happen to our energy sources only then it will be happening to all of us not just a segregated section of our population, the smokers. I hope that you can all understand the difficulty in trying to dissect the many layers of this ill-fated fiasco. Still most of you will 'get it' if you can set aside your abject hatred for smokers for a few minutes to read this. But my biggest problem here is to try to explain this mess so that even Liberals can 'feel' what is going on is not only an injustice to a portion of our society, an injustice that will soon also befall all of us, but also to all freedom loving Americans, that this is absolutely insane.

To begin with, in case you haven't noticed, in less then three months Obama and his Socialists have dug themselves, and us, into a really big economic hole with all of their free spending insanity. While most people are bright enough to understand what Will Rogers meant when he spoke of finding yourself in a deep hole to simply stop digging, politicians have never been that astute. Obama and his Socialists have probably never even heard of Rogers so they continue to keep digging while HOPE-ing for a CHANGE in our economic misfortunes. That was after all their entire political platform and apparently HOPE to CHANGE is their entire economic plan. After already digging through the soft top soil of the multi-billion dollars in the stealfromus and Omnibus bills, Obama and his team of backhoes are getting set to dig even deeper into the trillion dollar bedrock of our Nation. Deeper than all of the other previous Presidential administrations and Congresses combined with their new 'budget.' By the time these dimwitted economic excavators are finished with their bottomless money pit, beside it our magnificent Grand Canyon is going to look like a three inch long, hairline crack in a stucco wall.

Unfortunately it is part of their 'Plan' for us, the American taxpayers, to eventually fill this hole back in. This is what Obama really means when he talks about "shovel ready jobs for Americans." It is also unfortunate that with not so much as breaking a sweat Congress is using the heavy equipment to dig out this hole, but American taxpayers will end up sweating buckets for generations trying to shovel it all back in. But then it is always the guys who don't have to break a sweat that make the big bucks, make the big decisions and cause most of the problems.

Now, after Obama's mumbo-jumbo-ling, hypocritical double talk of first tripling the national deficit, only to then slyly promise to cut our deficit in half, he desperately needs someone to start manning the shovels. By using the old faithful Socialist tool of 'Class Hatred' Obama began filling this enormous void by over taxing 'The Rich." Or at least his new definition of the rich, those single persons who make over $200,000.00 and couples who make over $250,000.00, would now be taxed at a rate of 42%. Most Obamaites accepted this without giving a second thought to the fact that Obama and his Mrs. have earnings that are well above this new 'Rich' class, meanwhile the liberals cheered! Most other Americans simply shrugged their shoulders because they didn't make that kind of dough. But with such an expansive deepening hole Obama still needed more people shoveling. Whether you want to believe it or not, eventually Obama and his Congress will not be satisfied until we all have blisters on our hands.

For instance, a few weeks ago his second choice to start shoveling was our wounded Veterans. Obama figured that he could save some money by making our Veterans who were wounded in battle pay for their own treatment for their wounds. But Obama quickly ran into trouble with this idea because unlike himself and his faithful Socialists, almost everyone else loves and respects our wounded Veterans and immediately saw the immorality of this unethical plan. Even some of his media lapdogs questioned this contemptible move. So Obama moved on to bide his time while remaining confidant that some day in the future Americans will be so far in debt that we will have to submit to even this vile treason perpetrated against our wounded Heroes. But as for now Obama still needed somebody else to start shoveling.

To get things rolling again what Obama needed was a group of people that everyone hated. Like smokers! Then to sweeten the deal he would say that he was using the money that he saved for a 'noble cause.' So for now the money that he would tax the smokers would be directed to that noble cause of providing health care for children. He would do this by expanding the government's State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, which was part of their socialist agenda anyway. Starting on April 1, 2009 Obama now had a new tobacco tax providing revenue for health care for children. Now who could argue with that? Well besides tobacco consumers and conservatives who believe it is wrong to systematically take money from one group of people and then give it to another group. Obama's is by placing the burden on one segregated group of people to fund health care for another group. And that my friends is Socialism. So all that was left to do now was to give all those smokers a shovel on April Fools' Day and to tell them to start filling in that huge economic hole. Or at least that's the way it looks on the surface.

However, as with most of what goes on in our government, it is the tangled mess of clumsy intrigue, underhanded dealings, stupidity and backstabbing mayhem, which lays below the service of such appropriations that is the true story.

As much as the government has tried in the past, and failed, to control the public's vices they still can't get it through their collective noggins that people are going to do what they want to do, even smoke tobacco. Initially it should be noted that this is the first Obama tax that is being placed on the very people Obama promised to help and on those who helped him get elected, the poor and the middle class.

For instance 33.3% of the people living below the poverty level are smokers. Of minorities, 29% and 23.1% of Black American men and women respectively are smokers. With Hispanics it is 27.7% and 17.3% respectively and with Native Americans this jumps to 41.7% and 38.1% respectively! The numbers fall respectively to 17.9% and 9.9% for Asian American men and women. White Americans smokers are 26.5% and 23.6% respectively.

Smokers in the United States' population over 18 years of age include 25.9 million men (27.1%) and 22.8 million women (22.8%). Ninety percent of smokers begin before the age of twenty. Fifty percent begin by age fourteen and twenty-five percent by the age of twelve, or the 6th grade! It is estimated that 4.1 million teenagers between 12 and 17 smoke with more than 6000 teenagers 'trying a smoke' for the first time EACH DAY and more than 3000 new underage smokers becoming daily smokers, EVERY DAY!

Likewise it is shown that the less education one has increases the chances that they will be a smoker with 34.7% of US smokers acquiring 9 to 11 years of education while falling to 11.6% with 16 or more years of education. Knowing this, along with Obama being a smoker and not willing to release his school transcripts, one has to wonder just how much education did the man really absorb?

Despite what has come to be commonly believed that smoking is on the decline in our society, the use of tobacco is actually on the rise in our country. That should not surprise many of us if we simply look at how our educational system is failing and the increase in the poor and lower middle classes.

Be that as it may, despite Obama's claims of going after 'The Rich', for these lower economic classes there will plenty more of these consumer taxes where this came from in the future, whether they smoke or not.

Yet advocates of the new tobacco tax publicly tell us that this tax, basically $1.01 per pack of cigarettes, will not only provide the necessary funds for children's health care but will be a deterrent to force smokers to quit smoking, or to at least cut back on their habits. But while Obama and his Socialist coconspirators want us to pat them on the back in congratulations that they have now come up with a plan to make America tobacco free, what they aren't telling us is that in order to keep the money rolling in that will now be needed to pay for their expanded SCHIP over the next five years, at an estimated cost of 35 billion dollars, is that these Liberal economically challenged mental midgets are counting on at least 22.4 million NEW smokers by 2017 to keep this SCHIP afloat!

To add to this hypocrisy we should remember that this same Congress included 75 million dollars for smoking cessation programs in their stealfromus bill. Am I alone with the feeling that these clowns don't have a clue in what they are doing from one minute to the next? Lets face it folks, our government under Obama doesn't care where the money is going as long as they get it gone and get their cut. While Obama is counting on smokers to keep on lighting up to finance SCHIP he tells us that his tax will help smokers decide to quit or at least slow down. Meanwhile they add money to the stealfromus bill to help people to quit but they now need the tax revenue of new smokers to run SCHIP. Crazy isn't it. The thing to remember is that the already heavily taxed tobacco products are a gigantic government cash cow on several levels. There was a reason why the Federal government subsidized the tobacco industry with billions of taxpayers' dollars just a few short years ago, that reason was collecting the high taxes on tobacco. Now that they are no longer subsidizing J.R. Reynolds and the Marlboro Man all the Feds have to do is collect the taxes. So anyone who thinks that Obama and his Liberal over-spenders really want a smokeless America are only kidding themselves, or are taking another long pull on that tainted Kool Aid.

Now here is a crazy thought. Every year tobacco consumers cost the states and Federal governments hundreds of millions of dollars for health care issues related to their tobacco use. Remember most smokers come from below or just above the poverty level so few have health insurance and many will end up sick from their habits. So if Obama is going to add this new tax on tobacco and use the revenue for health care, all together now, why not use it for the health care of the tobacco users? That way if the number of smokers does decline, then eventually so will the number of tobacco related health issues that the states and Feds are now paying for. In the same respect if tobacco use continues to increase so will the tax revenue to provide health care for the users. Likewise the money that is saved for not having to care for the tobacco users could now go to finance SCHIP! I know, call me crazy. But it seems so simple doesn't it. Maybe it just isn't socialistic enough for Obama and his Liberal Congress to have people who are actually paying for their own health care, even in such a round about way.

Now despite what Obama and this crooked Congress want us to believe, corporate executives are not all idiots. Many of them really do know how to run a business, foresee future problems in their industry and how to make huge profits. That is exactly the case in the tobacco industry. These guys are so smart they get us to buy products that kill us at an alarming rate and had our government giving them billions of taxpayers' dollars for years even while they were operating in the black! So it came as no surprise that in knowing that this tax increase was about to hit that these tobacco companies RAISED the price of their products in anticipation of lost revenue before the new tax took affect! In the near future these two words, lost revenue, are going to deeply affect each and every one of us over and over again as Obama and his Congress add tax after tax to everything we use, consume and buy to help fill in that money pit they have created. But before the new taxes even add to our burdens, corporations, retailers and suppliers are going to add their own little 'tax' to their products in anticipation of lost revenue when the new Obama taxes are applied. You can't blame them as they have bills to pay too and when these new taxes hit, just like the smokers, we will all have to cut back our consumption of their products leaving businesses no choice but to raise prices.

Likewise Obama has vowed that he is going to increase taxes on all of our energy sources: natural gas, electricity, gas and so on. Like tobacco users Obama expects us to cut back on our use of these energy sources. So just like tobacco we can expect all of these energy sources to increase in unit price even before the taxes take effect. Of course when it comes to energy that will affect everything we buy, from clothing to food, as it all has to be transported and it all has to be handled. This new tobacco tax isn't even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. It is just the very minute beginning in what is going to be a terrible tax and spend administration for the next four years. So if you are feeling a bit smug about smokers being taxed, I'd back off because Obama hasn't even gotten his feet wet yet and when he does he's coming after all of us to man the shovels.

Oh yeah, now before I go have I mentioned where the illegal aliens fit in? Well, just to make sure that this plan followed his socialist ideals Obama included in SCHIP, health care for the children of illegal aliens along with the other children. After all what good is nobility if it doesn't garner a few votes from the soon to be amnestied new citizens of our great country? Besides nobody in Obama's lapdog media will mention the inclusion of these illegals once again receiving health care paid for by the taxes forced upon American citizens. The only people Obama had to worry about mentioning their inclusion was Fox News and a few conservatives like that pest Limbaugh.

Now in case you haven't thought of it while reading this, I'll leave you with this disgusting thought. As seen by the previous statistics on teenage smoking and the percentage of smokers who start by the ages of fourteen and twelve, Obama and his Socialists are counting on the children of America to continue to start smoking at a very young age to pay for their SCHIP! Don't tell me that they didn't think of this, if I can find these statistics then certainly the Feds are fully aware of them.

We should forget sex education because I am pretty sure that most of these kids have figured it out already and that most of them really do know what they should and shouldn't do. You know just like we did way back when. Instead we should start teaching these kids about the hazards of smoking. Take them on field trips to the cancer wards in hospitals! But, oh wait, we can't do that, the PC'ers will point out that it might upset them. Better to let them all hack their lives away then to upset them. Besides, how else will Obama and his Socialists pay for SCHIP without millions of new kids killing themselves a little everyday. I'll tell you, it is a sad state to which we have fallen. And as of yet we can't even see the bottom of the pit.


God Bless America!

Semper Fi,
Mike


"Copyright 2009.  Michael E. Tank   All rights reserved. No part of this document may be copied, faxed, electronically transmitted, or in any other manner duplicated without express written permission of the author."