Tobacco companies don’t pay cigarette taxes – Kansas smokers do!
- The proposed 55-cent state excise tax increase (to $1.34 per pack) could cause Kansas tax-paid cigarette volume to fall by nearly 16 percent. As a result of the 2009 passage of the 62 cent per pack federal excise tax increase, cigarette volume has fallen 11 percent in Kansas. Both taxes could mean a drop of more than 25 percent in sales in two years.
- A $1.34 per pack Kansas tax would be about eight times greater than the 17-cent tax in Missouri. Kansas consumers could save $11.70 per carton by crossing the border to Missouri, and there would be some similar savings with some Oklahoma tribal merchants, where taxes are as low as 5.75 cents per pack.
- Retail sales in the state’s 1,248 convenience stores would fall by about $86 million, in addition to the $26 million lost in sundry product sales if a 55-cent cigarette tax increase was passed.
- Higher cigarette taxes are great for “trunk slammers.” In the face of outrageous cigarette prices, smokers often avoid paying taxes by purchasing on the Internet or, worst case, the black market.
Enough is enough! Government would make 60 percent of the profit on every pack of cigarettes.
- Kansas smokers only comprise 17.9 percent of the population but they paid more than $210 million in taxes and tobacco settlement payments to the state in the 2008 fiscal year.
- Kansas already receives millions of dollars each year in tobacco settlement payments, and yet it allocates only $2.2 million a year for tobacco prevention. As a result, Kansas ranks 46th among the states in spending on tobacco prevention, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recommends that Kansas spend $32 million.