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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

So America has massively increased the tax burden on the poorest Americans (ever increasing tobacco taxes) while simultaneously cutting taxes on Capital Gains and Inheritance and now we are considering a large cut to the Corporate rate?

Not to mention all the states with a lottery, which can also be thought of as a tax on poor people who are bad at math.

This seems like class warfare.

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In California we have a crisis, not enough people are smoking and paying the taxes. So the cigarette taxes have to be raised again and again then other tax sources have to be found.

That's why you don't use "sin taxes" to do anything but combat "sin". Using taxes like this to pay for things you actually want to keep messes with incentives in an evil way.

And unsustainable way, as higher taxes->fewer consumers->higher taxes->...

With that spin, sure it would seem that way. You might consider it "Warfare" if the poor were being forced to smoke, or say there weren't pictures of cancer on the cover of the packages of cigarettes, or minors were allowed to smoke or there wasn't a huge vice tax on cigarettes essentially everywhere in the world, and a ban on cigarette advertising in most countries then yeah if you ignore all of that you might consider it class warfare...

You can apply post-facto justification all you like, but cigarette taxes are still regressive, no matter how you look at it.

Whether it's part of a general attack on the poor is a separate question, but it does fit a pattern of punching downwards.

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