Why? Just because you don’t approve of them? What things do you like? How would you holler if suddenly there was a good size tax on it?
Here is some background info from various websites, in addition to the link posted by Nametag…
http://www.ccfc.ca.gov/prop10facts.htm
The initiative, approved by voters in November 1998, added a 50 cent-per-pack tax to cigarettes and a comparable tax to other tobacco products. Prop. 10 is expected to generate approximately $700 million annually.
All revenue generated by Prop. 10 is collected in the California Children and Families Trust Fund Account, set up within the State Treasury.
• Eighty percent of the approximately $700 million collected each year is allocated to community trust funds established by each County Commission. Allocations to each county are based on the number of births, according to the birth mother’s county of residence. Before disbursing any funds locally, County Commissions must develop strategic plans based on extensive public input. California parents, families and community groups are invited to participate in local forums and provide input on how the money should be spent to best meet local needs.
• Twenty percent of the revenues are allocated to the State Commission for statewide expenditures, including a public education campaign, educational materials and training, technical support for the local County Commissions, education and training of child care providers, and research and development. Only one percent will be used for administrative functions of the State Commission.
http://apha.confex.com/apha/131am/techprogram/session_11144.htm
To support more effective funding decisions, program planning, and policies, First 5 California has developed an outcomes-based accountability system which tracks progress in the areas of maternal and child health, child development, family functioning and systems change.
http://www.smartvoter.org/1998nov/ca/state/prop/10/
• Creates state commission to provide information and materials and to formulate guidelines for establishment of comprehensive early childhood development and smoking prevention programs.
• Creates county commissions to develop strategic plans with emphasis on new programs.
• Creates trust fund for these programs. Funding for state and county commissions and programs raised by additional $.50 per pack tax on cigarette distributors and equivalent increase in state tax on distributed tobacco products.
• Funds exempt from Proposition 98 requirement that dedicates portion of general tax revenues to schools.
Summary of Arguments AGAINST Proposition 10:
Opposed by California education officials and taxpayer advocates. Amends Constitution to keep funds from California’s schools. Duplicates existing programs for children and families. Creates huge new bureaucracy; 59 new commissions, thousands of new bureaucrats and over 500 political appointees to spend millions of taxpayer dollars with no independent oversight.
Contact FOR Proposition 10:
California Children and
Families Initiative
Rob Reiner, Chair
http://ca.lwv.org/lwvc.files/nov98/pc/prop10.html
OPPONENTS SAY
• Unnecessary state and county commissions would add to the educational bureaucracy.
• Revenues from increased tobacco tax are exempt from a Constitutional requirement that a percentage of all state revenues goes to schools.
http://www.smokeshopmag.com/1298/signals.htm
PUBLIC MISLED?
The cause appeared sound, but did voters really understand how the programs would be funded? “We believe that the proponents of Proposition 10 carefully and willfully misled the voters of California by not disclosing the explicit details of their taxation plan,” said Charles Janigna, president of the California Association of Retail Tobacconists. “We have witnessed the difficulties that the Board of Equalization in California is having interpreting the language of the initiative and the confusion it has created with [1988’s] Proposition 99.” The idea for Proposition 10 grew out of a 1997 White House conference on infant development, arranged by President Clinton at the urging of movie director Rob Reiner. It will be implemented on a county-by-county basis with 59 regulatory commissions established to oversee the programs. Reiner, known for his role as “Meathead” on the popular '70s sitcom “All in the Family,” began his crusade for early childhood development care several years ago. In the early to mid 1990s, he produced a documentary on child development featuring a parade of Hollywood stars that aired on ABC.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA220.html
Proposition 10 backers, led by actor-filmmaker Rob Reiner, are using children as a smoke screen for their $700 million tax hike on California’s five million smokers, who are disproportionately poor and minority. The measure would transfer income from the working poor and others to pay for new government spending.
The supporters’ claim that increasing the price of cigarettes would discourage teenagers from smoking is based on inconclusive research. In survey responses, teenagers say tougher enforcement of the ban on the sale of cigarettes to minors would be more effective in lowering teen smoking than anti-smoking advertising, peer pressure or higher prices.
In any case, the tax proceeds are not earmarked to pay for any specific program to combat teen smoking. Instead, smokers would be taxed to fund a new state commission, 58 separate county commissions, hundreds of political appointees and perhaps as many as 8,000 additional bureaucrats to provide a “comprehensive and integrated system of services” for preschool children.
That raises the question: Why should a low-income smoker be burdened with an average of $170 more per year in tobacco taxes to pay for redundant bureaucracies and social programs that have nothing to do with curbing youth smoking when the state is sitting on a $4 billion budget surplus?
The supporters of Proposition 10 have wrapped their anti-smoking crusade in the flag of “saving the children.” Truth be told, the measure is a transparent attempt to stick it to the tobacco industry to fund the pet projects of a misguided multimillionaire do-gooder.
http://tobaccodocuments.org/ai_news/11508.html
The California Children and Families Commission will unveil a $14-million ad campaign tomorrow promoting the new children’s programs funded by Proposition 10. The ads come six weeks before Prop. 10 – a 50-cent-a-pack tobacco tax – faces repeal on the March ballot. The Children and Families Commission was created by Proposition 10 to spend the new revenue on early childhood development and smoking prevention. Critics claim, however, that the Commission has been too slow in allocating the money. “We haven’t had a lot of visibility. We are working feverishly to get it done,” said actor and director Rob Reiner, the commission chairman.
http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/1998/10/26/editorial3.html
Proposition 10, the so-called California Children and Families First Initiative, is the Trojan horse of 1998 ballot measures. With an alluring title and some high-profile Hollywood help, it is trying to exploit the concerns Californians have about children.
While Proposition 10 pledges to enhance child development programs in California, it would actually build a massive self-regulating and self-serving bureaucracy that would disrupt existing programs that help families and young children.
Proposition 10 creates 59 state and county commissions, and then gives them open-ended authority to spend money on whatever they see fit without legislative or regulatory oversight. The State Senate Office of Research notes that, “Except for appointing commissioners to fixed terms, elected officials (the governor, legislators and supervisors) would have no control over the state and county commissions.”
In the process of setting up an ill-conceived shadow government, Proposition 10 detracts from existing state policies and programs that do in fact help children.
Jane Armstrong, whose Santa Cruz-based Alliance of California Taxpayers and Involved Voters, calls Proposition 10 ``good for kids, but extremely bad policy.’’ The state chairwoman of a group that fought for term limits and is a spin- off of the Proposition 13 tax revolt sees the Reiner initiative as a regressive tax that will funnel money into programs run by amateurs, with no accountability to voters.
BOTTOM LINE
Proposition 10 levies a steep new tax on unpopular tobacco products to pay for an ill-defined list of do-good projects for toddlers. The tax will hit low-income smokers hardest but aims to help their children most. It will make it tougher for teenagers to buy cigarettes and could jump-start new local programs for kids during the most critical time of their lives. Unresolved: how to keep these programs going if smoking rates fall?
http://www.pacificresearch.org/pub/cap/1998/98-10-21.html
A Taxing Proposition
Sacramento, CA—What would you say if the government, seeking to fund more police, levied a special tax on jelly doughnuts? Or what if a special tax were placed on hats in order raise money to fund the creation of new public libraries? Most people would likely respond that while more police and libraries may be useful and even necessary, why should devotees of hats and jelly doughnuts be singled out to pay for goods that supposedly benefit the entire public? Yet, this discriminatory tax philosophy is what undergirds Proposition 10 on California’s November ballot.
Proposition 10 is the brainchild of Hollywood actor/director Rob Reiner, who played the character “Meathead” on the sitcom “All in the Family.” Under its provisions, taxes on cigarettes would be raised 50 cents per pack to pay for a slew of new government programs.
Regardless of the worth of such measures, why should smokers be singled out to pay for them? And why discriminate against smokers by making them the cash cow to fund some do-gooder’s wish list of social programs?
Prop. 10 would create a state commission and 58 county commissions to dole out the new funds. Much of the new bureaucracy would be unaccountable to elected officials. According to the State Senate report, the county commissions will not have to submit their strategic plans for approval by the county board of supervisors. The commissions also are not subject to outside audits of their performance. The report notes that, “Except for appointing commissioners to fixed terms, elected officials (the governor, legislators, and supervisors) would have no control over the state and county commissions.”
Finally, although Prop. 10 funds are supposed to go to early childhood development programs, the initiative defines such programs in very open-ended terms. Such vagueness invites expenditures on programs having only the weakest relationship to early childhood development.
http://www.library.ca.gov/SITN/2004/0450.htm
AUDITS AND INVESTIGATIONS *************
California Children and Families Commissions: Some County Commissions’ Contracting Practices Are Lacking, and Both the State and County Commissions Can Improve Their Efforts to Find Funding Partners and Collect Data on Program Performance. By the California State Auditor, Bureau of State Audits. Report 2003-123. (The Auditor, Sacramento, California) July 2004. 96 p.
Full Text at: www.bsa.ca.gov/bsa/pdfs/2003-123.pdf
[“Use of Prop. 10 Funds Faulted: A state audit of five counties finds most money for child programs unspent. The report said some county panels set up to distribute the Proposition 10 money kept incomplete records, did not establish clear rules for hiring contractors or failed to evaluate the effectiveness of the programs they did fund.” Los Angeles Times (July 16, 2004) 1.]
“They’ve done something extraordinary,” Rob Reiner told the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week. “Considering it’s the biggest county in America, there’s a lot of folks looking at what L.A. is doing.” The filmmaker and activist was referring to a new plan to provide free pre-school for every 3- and 4-year-old in Los Angeles County, courtesy of funds from a statewide tobacco tax.
The revolutionary pre-school concept joins two trends that have caught the imaginations of both policy wonks and the general public. The first is “early child-development” theory, which holds that the human noggin is fully formed within the first three years (or, depending on the availability of good day care, five years) of life - a notion that grows more popular the more its premises are shown to be false.
The second is the decades-long development of excise taxes designed to discourage smoking. California (which had one of the nation’s highest excise rates even before the smokes-to-schools Proposition 10 was passed in 1998) now collects 50 cents per pack to keep kids in class and off Teletubbies - certainly the most creative yoking together of source and beneficiary since Iran-Contra.
But more important than either of these civic efforts is what Prop 10 has done for Reiner himself. From merely being another Hollywood player, he has now become a quasi-governmental official - Chairman of the California Children and Families Commission - with a leadership role in disbursing $700 million in annual tobacco tax revenues. This is just the latest feather in the cap of the successful director, producer, actor and intellectual beacon for Hillary Clinton during her village-taking days. It’s common to marvel at how far Reiner has risen above early typecasting as Mike “Meathead” Stivic, the sanctimonious mooch responsible for so many of Archie Bunker’s most painful hours on the TV classic All In the Family. (You can track Reiner’s rising profile by how his relationship to Prop 10 is described in the press; while early reports called him the “driving force” or “inspiration” behind the measure, the Chronicle now designates him the law’s “author.”)
On closer inspection, though, it’s not always easy to see the difference between the freeloader who lectured Archie on women’s lib and overpopulation while helping himself to the Bunker groceries (a practice that no doubt contributed to the Hollywood triple threat’s relentless supersizing), and the tiresome busybody who can’t stop haranguing us with obscure data points like the fact that smoking is bad for you and that children should be fed and changed on a regular basis.
More alarmingly, the fully grown Reiner has access to a fridge far more capacious than Archie’s, and his motivations have grown, if anything, more narrowly personal. In describing his motivations for Prop 10, the Meathead consistently describes how his adherence to the first-three-years cult came out of therapy after the breakup of his first marriage. “It’s no great revelation that my early experiences as a child informed my relationship to others,” the son of funnyman Carl Reiner confides to Horizon magazine.
It’s quite a leap, however, to extrapolate from a tough Hollywood childhood to a wholesale belief in the early-years theory, “enriched” learning environments, a half-decade window of mental “hardwiring,” and the efficacy of pumping Mozart into the uterus. The early-years assumption has taken some knocks in recent years, most notably the publication of John T. Bruer’s The Myth of the First Three Years, which argues that cognitive development occurs throughout life, and that much of the effort spent on French for tots could more profitably be spent addressing the more basic needs of kids. Rather than addressing the Bruer argument, early-years proponents have typically shifted emphasis, cautioning readers against “taking to heart [the book’s] negative messages” and redoubling calls for Early Head Start and other dubious attempts to pump babies up. Since everybody agrees infants and toddlers need attention, why ask what type of attention?
That close-enough-for-rock-n-roll attitude informs Prop 10’s other plank - reducing smoking through excise taxes. California, whose per-capita cigarette consumption is the second lowest in the nation, was a poor test case for this method, as well as a poor source of tobacco-based revenue. Prop 10 funds are parceled among California’s 58 counties according to birthrate. Los Angeles County’s ambitious program is a direct result of its population’s fertility; other counties, according to the Chronicle are having a harder time getting such efforts off the ground in the face of declining tobacco revenues.
Nor is it clear that those declining revenues represent the decline in smoking Prop 10’s proponents claim. A Tax Foundation study done in 1998, when Golden State smokers were only burdened by the earlier Proposition 99 excise tax, found that 9.3 percent of statewide cigarette consumption was accounted for by smuggled product. In the intervening years, U.S. tobacco sales for the Mexican market have continued their drastic increase (most likely for resale to California); cigarette sales in neighboring Nevada have climbed 32 percent since 1995. Since 2000, California Board of Equalization agents have been finding an increasing number of counterfeit tax stamps on cigarettes being sold in state. None of these phenomena prove Californians have taken to smuggling smokes in a big way, but together they suggest caution before believing Reiner’s claim that declining tobacco revenues reflect equal declines in smoking rates.
Also vague is the legal basis for taking cigarette money to pay for early development programs. Proposition 10 withstood a 1999 legal challenge from the California Association of Retail Tobacconists, which argued that tobacco taxes and children’s health were unrelated issues. The judge in that case ruled that second-hand smoke effects on children and tobacco use by expectant mothers provided a “credible” link between the two. In practice, however, it’s hard to see where under-five programs at Orange County Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs fit into this equation.
None of which bothers Reiner, who crows about Prop 10’s success like the Meathead watching Archie get a kiss from Sammy Davis Jr. In fact, far from being an older version of Mike Stivic, the aging Reiner may actually be worse. At least the Meathead was on the side of the angels when it came to racism, chauvinism, and the war in Vietnam. But who will give the raspberry to this preening Beverly Hills honcho who twists taxation policy for discredited therapeutic ends and squanders funds on feel-good programs whose failure will carry consequences only for the nameless?
Sadly, Reiner is right about one thing. Many people will be watching what L.A. County is doing. Even without that county’s windfall, officials in other areas are looking to start similar programs. The Chronicle quotes one San Mateo authority who is already projecting a program that “will need funds from outside the Proposition 10 revenue stream.” As tobacco revenues dry up nationwide, more officials will look to this stream for the seed money (or in Reiner’s phrase “glue money”) for costly programs of dubious value, which will ultimately be funded by people who never smoked a day in their lives. These are some of the dangers of subjecting public policy to the mid-life crises of fading Hollywood bigshots.
Tim Cavanaugh is Reason’s Web editor.