Big Tobacco seems to have gotten their way yesterday, and Californians who made it to the polls voted down Prop 29, the cigarette tax by about a one-point margin. After spending millions of dollars on an ad campaign that made liberal use of a bad buzzword no one likes ("bureaucracy"), cigarette makers can breathe a sigh of relief today that the most populous state in the union will not go the way of New York and start charging more for smokes. But can they? Absentee ballots haven't been fully tallied, and with a margin of just 64,000 votes on the No side, CBS is saying this measure is still too close to call.
The measure had strong support in polling across the state just a couple of months ago, but the ads by the opposition did the trick, and the proposition was defeated by 50.8% of the vote with 100% of precincts reporting.
Cigarettes cost like $10 now in New York, and taxes passed over the last decade have succeeded in discouraging people from smoking, especially teenagers. But no, Californians bought into all the ads that said the money from the tax would be mismanaged and wouldn't stay in California, and they did not listen to the ads from the American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, Lance Armstrong and others supporting the tax. Critics say that it wasn't the tax that was bad so much as the way the measure was written. So perhaps another, rewritten measure will make it on the ballot in the coming years.
And anyway, people, it was only a dollar.
