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BATON ROUGE — As Louisiana's special legislative session reached the end of its first week, no consensus emerged for how to rebalance the budget, but Gov. John Bel Edwards said Friday he's making progress in persuading lawmakers to raise taxes.
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Food for thought for Louisiana lawmakers. Please consider increasing the cigarette tax to at least the national average. Remember, Louisiana is consistently ranked the number one least healthy state in the country…and it is costing taxpayers billions.
According to a report by the Louisiana Department of Health & Hospitals’ Centers for Disease Control, annual health care costs in Louisiana directly caused by smoking is $1.89 billion; and annual smoking-caused productivity losses is an additional $2.05 billion. That’s $3.94 BILLION per year! Louisiana’s annual Medicaid-related smoking expenses are estimated to be somewhere between $600 million and $800 million. Imagine the economic/health impact for our state if we simply raise cigarette taxes to the national average ($1.61).
In 2009, more than 364.5 million packs of cigarettes were purchased in Louisiana (that number has no-doubt increased with the increase of the percentage of Louisiana residents that now smoke). The Louisiana Legislature recently voted to raise cigarette taxes only from $0.50 to $0.86 per pack. Now they are proposing to raise tax on a pack of smokes another $0.22. Why? If Louisiana simply raised cigarette taxes to the national average that would conservatively generate an additional $345 MILLION per year for the state.
Find out more: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/food-thought-related-louisianas-budget-crisis-proposed-jim-pittman?trk=prof-post
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