There's
The Rub
By Conrado
de Quiros
The
people who toiled through the night to get the sin taxes passed have
every reason to be pissed off at Ralph Recto. They can only feel
stabbed in the back. The difference between P60 billion and P15
billion is vast, the first being the revenue that would have been
gotten from the original sin tax bill and the second from Recto’s
watered-down version of it. The charge that he’s more concerned
with protecting the health of the tobacco industry than that of his
countrymen is believable.
Juan
Flavier, Fidel Ramos’ brilliant health secretary and author of the
campaign, “Yosi Kadiri,” puts it thus: “The sin tax bill as
originally proposed would have moved us forward. Recto’s version
keeps us all in the same place. There is a preponderance of evidence
worldwide that higher taxes achieve two things: they reduce the
incidence of smoking by raising prices, and they raise more revenue
that we can hopefully plow into health care. If you water down the
rates, the twin benefits are diminished.”
I
laud the goals of the sin tax, some of my good friends being among
those who designed it. But I myself have misgivings about it. I laud
its goals, but I don’t know that it is the best way to achieve
them.
My
first misgiving about it is that it’s not just the tobacco
companies that will hurt from the new taxes, the poor will too. They
are the main consumers of cigarettes and liquor. The slogans painted
on the islands of España and elsewhere that shout their opposition
to the sin taxes for being antipoor are not without basis.
In
fact, everyone concedes so, even the advocates of the sin taxes. But
that is offset they say, one, by the health benefits to the poor,
and, two, the revenue that will be plowed back to fighting poverty,
in that order of priority. That is my second misgiving: I’m not so
sure it will produce the health benefits it foresees even if I’m
sure it will raise revenues.
I
can believe that raising the prices of tobacco and liquor will reduce
the incidence of smoking in particular insofar as it could lower the
rate of new smokers every year. But I cannot believe, and have yet to
see the studies that prove it, that raising prices will reduce
smoking among those who are already smoking. It’s like saying that
higher prices for shabu will lessen shabu use.
That
is neither extreme nor facetious. All the methods to help you quit
smoking start with one proposition: Smoking is not a habit, it is an
addiction. It is as much an addiction as taking shabu or heroin,
though arguably with far less immediate cataclysmic effects. That is
why it is the hardest thing to quit, as any smoker will tell you.
Which I can personally attest to, managing to do it way back in the
early 1980s only after enduring the greatest torments. Raising the
prices of cigarettes will not stop you from smoking, or reduce it.
Only the fear of death will.
The
premise of the sin taxes is shaky. It assumes that people make
rational choices under the most irrational circumstances. It
postulates a smoker (or drinker) pondering his situation and
concluding, “The prices of cigarettes (or liquor) have risen by 50
percent, I will now smoke (or drink) only half of what I used to.”
That reflects reality only about as much as the Marcoses reflect all
that is true, good, and beautiful.
Are
there other ways to curb smoking and raise revenues? Assuming to
begin with that the revenues will be used to fight poverty and not
just to win an election?
Yes.
As
the revenue part goes, why tax the poor instead of the rich? Instead
of cigarettes and liquor, why not tax to death Mercedes-Benzes and
BMWs and other luxury cars? Why not tax to death yachts and private
planes and unused mansions? As sin goes, I can’t imagine anything
more sinful than ostentatious displays of wealth in a metropolis that
teems with street children and beggars.
As
to stopping smoking, well, what is the biggest incentive to smoke and
drink in this country and elsewhere? That is not the prices of
cigarettes and liquor which may seem cheap to tax gatherers but are
not so to the poor who patronize them. That is advertising, which
conjures not just sensations of pleasurableness but images of being
cool (for cigarettes) and macho (for liquor).
The
generation that came before mine was particularly into both, thanks
to movies, local and foreign, that featured the bida as smoking and
drinking. Thanks in particular to stars like Humphrey Bogart, who was
never without a cigarette in his mouth as he mouthed his lines in an
iconic Bogart-y way. He himself died from cancer of the esophagus
from smoking. As did a great many of the people he inspired to smoke.
In
the case of drinking, culture, more than the price of Tanduay or
Emperador, is a more decisive influence. Toma beats
jueteng as this country’s favorite pastime, bringing with it
not just pleasures of drinking, the bidahan along with
the sense of wellbeing from alcohol, but the cultural reinforcement
of being siga. There’s an implicit contest in how high you
can rack up beer cases under your table in beerhouses—“case-to-case
basis,” as the joke goes.
So
why not use the same advertising to discourage smoking and drinking?
If government is loath to use money for it, it can always get the
advertising outfits to pitch in pro bono to run ads in the media and
in billboards—the way they do in the United States—that
aggressively puts the fear of God, or the Grim Reaper, on smokers and
drinkers? Recently the United States ran various ads on TV and the
Internet showing young men and women with tubes in their throats and
in horrendous states of debilitation after being ravaged by cancer in
various parts of the body from smoking. If that doesn’t make you
quit, I don’t know what will.
Well,
I know high prices won’t.
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