> Are people getting addicted? Well who are you to infringe on the tobacco industry’s right to make a buck?
There are 2 issues here:
1) Higher taxes are a very strange and indirect way of stopping something that's considered unacceptable. Suppose we made murder legal and simply taxed "hit" contracts with a very high rate. That would be crazy, right? But that seems to be our policy with cigarettes. If we're serious about stopping smoking, then we'd make it illegal, and put the tobacco companies out of business entirely.
2) Tobacco companies specifically target children, who aren't mature enough to make good choices, and then the kids get hooked on nicotine for life. So that needs to be addressed specifically. I'm amenable to protecting kids, but much less so about paternalism for adults. Again, though, I don't see tax policy as the answer here.
If you consider nicotine addiction to be a moral issue, which it might be, then there are very perverse incentives involved in taxing cigarettes, because the government is making money from something it considers immoral. I would also mention the addiction that many state governments have to lottery ticket revenue.