Posted: | March 17, 2015 04:41 PM |
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From: | Representative Mary Jo Daley and Rep. Dan Frankel |
To: | All House members |
Subject: | Enhancing public health via tobacco tax modernization |
In the near future, we will be introducing legislation to enact a 40 percent tax on the wholesale price of other tobacco products (OTP) in this Commonwealth, which will include e-cigarettes, and to increase the cigarette tax by $1.00 per pack. It is our sincere hope you will join us in this important effort. Cigarettes and OTPs, which include cigars, pipes, “roll-your-own” tobacco, and smokeless tobacco like snuff and chew—pose serious health risks and can lead to life-long addictions for our youth. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States and continues to be popular with young people and the population at large. Roughly 22 percent of high school students recently reported using tobacco products of some kind. Additionally, new, unregulated technologies such as e-cigarettes are often billed as safer alternatives to traditional cigarettes, yet initial lab tests have found detectable levels of carcinogens and toxic chemicals in these products. More than a quarter of a million youth who had never smoked a cigarette used electronic cigarettes in 2013 alone. Our current system of taxing cigarettes and other tobacco products in Pennsylvania is broken and in need of serious repair. Pennsylvania is the only state in the country that does not impose some type of tax on smokeless tobacco and is one of only two (Florida being the other) that does not tax cigars. Moreover, the Commonwealth is still fighting a reduction to our 2003 Tobacco Settlement payment as a result of our failure to tax roll-your-own tobacco. In fact, one of the reasons that the Attorney General’s office was unable to accept the terms of a proposed settlement was that our Commonwealth did not tax these tobacco products and could not guarantee taxation of such products in the future. Our legislation will impose a 40 percent tax on the wholesale price of other tobacco products, including e-cigarettes. This tax rate will be similar to the national average currently imposed on OTPs. Additionally, our proposal will increase the cigarette tax by $1.00 per pack. Not only will this tax serve as a barrier for people, especially children, to use OTPs and cigarettes, it also will provide a significant source of revenue to the Commonwealth and protect the Commonwealth’s future Tobacco Settlement payments from unnecessary reduction. Our legislation is part of Governor Wolf’s overall budget proposal for the 2015-2016 Fiscal Year. We hope you will join us in this public health effort by signing on as co-sponsors. |
Introduced as HB1213