Hidden among the various tax and fee hikes in Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley's budget is a proposal to dramatically increase the tax on "other tobacco products."

Advocates of this tax hike say it's necessary to decrease teen cigar use, but both the facts about youth cigar use and the tax design indicate this rationale is simply a smokescreen.

Instead, the tax hike seems a clever way to manipulate concern about youth tobacco use to funnel more revenue to the state government.

If you believed the rhetoric of lobbyist Vinny DeMarco, the main advocate behind this tax hike, Maryland is undergoing an epidemic of teenage cigar smoking. According to him, youth are turning away from cigarettes because of the 2010 cigarette tax increase and instead smoking lower-taxed cigars.

This assertion isn't supported by facts. According to the youth tobacco use survey done by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 9.5 per of underage middle and high school youth currently use cigars.

That is barely above the 8.8 percent of youth who used cigars in 2000, and lower than the 10.6 percent of youth who used cigars in 2008.

DeMarco also claims that youth cigarette use has decreased largely because of the state's higher cigarette tax that was imposed in 2007. But the data from the same DHMH report show youth cigarette use decreased dramatically between 2000 and 2002, when cigarette taxes remained stable, continued to decline between 2002 and 2004, a time period that included a cigarette tax increase, but then rose between the 2006 and 2008, a period of another cigarette tax hike.

There may be a connection between the decline in youth cigarette usage and increases in the state's cigarette tax, but it's not the clear-cut case that DeMarco claims.

If the rationale behind increasing the tax on cigars is underwhelming, the method proposed to tax them is defective. Teens don't buy expensive premium cigars enjoyed by aficionados, but smaller, cheap cigars.

To address this problem, these advocates claim Maryland needs a 36 percent increase in its tax on the wholesale price of "other tobacco products," namely cigars, pipe tobacco, snuff and chewing tobacco.

A value-based tax, like this one, hits more expensive products far harder than cheaper products. Take two cigars -- one with a wholesale price of 40 cents (likely the cigar purchased by teenagers) and one with a wholesale price of $4.00 (the choice of older, wealthier consumers).

Under the governor's plan, the tax on the cheaper cigar will amount to 28 cents, while the tax on the expensive cigar amounts to $2.80.

Value-based taxes actually shift consumption to cheaper products since the tax amount increases with the product cost. If the governor's plan is to dampen the sale of cheaper cigars, this is exactly the wrong tax to enact.

The likely result of this tax hike will be to severely hurt Maryland stores that sell expensive premium cigars. The products sold by these stores will be disproportionately affected by this tax and become much more expensive.

Considering the ease of ordering premium cigars online or buying them from a neighboring state (all of which would have far lower taxes on cigars), this tax would conceivably put many Maryland premium cigar stores out of business.

If O'Malley is really concerned about the cheap cigars being sold to youth, why penalize all tobacco products if the real problem is with only a small subset of the cigar market? A tax to address problems caused by cheap cigars should target cheap cigars.