It’s an election year, so it is no surprise that lobbyist Vinny DeMarco is urging candidates to support a tobacco tax hike. More than 200 legislative candidates have signed a pledge that DeMarco is pushing. It seems like a bad idea to me to support an ill-defined tax plan before one is able to read the full details. It also seems like a bad idea to pledge support for a group that has a history of promoting tax plans that don’t live up to their promise. Candidates should be more responsible than to sign on to this type of election-year gimmickry.

Candidates jumping on the cigarette tax bandwagon may consider the history of Health Care for All, the group pushing it.

In 2007, DeMarco successfully lobbied for a hike in the cigarette tax, ostensibly to fund Medicaid expansion. This tax failed to produce enough revenue to pay for that expansion, contrary to the predictions of the Health Care for All Coalition.

In 2011, DeMarco’s group pushed legislators to raise the alcohol tax. DeMarco said it was needed to fund services to people with disabilities. As I explain in this blog post, most of the money in the original legislation was never earmarked to accomplish this. Then, in the legislation actually signed by the governor, this modest diversion of funds to people with disabilities was further reduced and then eliminated after one year.

Of course, DeMarco doesn’t let the truth get in the way of a good sales pitch. On May 28 of this year, he wrote the Baltimore Sun claiming that “the money raised by the alcohol tax increase has been funding both health care needs as well as helping people with developmental disabilities, mental health issues and drug and alcohol addictions.” He’s right only in the sense that all tax dollars in the General Fund support these things (among many other projects and services). The alcohol tax revenue goes into the General Fund now; it is not specially diverted to pay for the things DeMarco claims.

In promoting this proposal, DeMarco trots out the same talking points he’s used in the past. Mainly it focuses on the need to reduce underage smoking and teen cigar use. I’ve looked at the evidence, and it’s far from the black-and-white case that DeMarco contends. I freely admit that raising cigarette taxes will reduce smoking, but there is little to support the claim that the previous cigarette hikes in Maryland have had the type of dramatic effects that DeMarco says.

The one thing we do know is that higher cigarette taxes will lead to more cigarette smuggling. As I’ve written about in the past, raising Maryland’s cigarette tax rates to even-higher levels will put us in the same situation as New York. Over half of the cigarettes smoked in New York were not bought in that state. That’s a huge hit on New York retailers. Do we really want to encourage that type of smuggling here?

In the past, I’ve written about the many reasons why hiking the cigarette tax is a bad idea. It still is. Of course, Maryland legislators seem to specialize in flawed public policy, so I won’t be surprised if we see another tobacco tax hike in 2015.