Well, not really, at least not yet. But there is this.
I think I posted a few years ago that taxing cigarettes so heavily was a big mistake for the states that were doing settlements with the tobacco companies. Sin taxes always work that way: You are ostensibly trying to discourage the sinfulness by making it more expensive, but that cash gets addictive to bureaucrats.
In California, whilst the property taxes have been some of the slowest-growing in the country, the state has repeatedly raised cigarette and tobacco taxes (and hydrocarbon taxes…). Every year or so a new measure is on the ballot asking voters to approve a raise in the tobacco tax in return for some treat like a freeway or a bridge or a school where their kids won’t get shot at as often. It’s all very cute to watch them pretend that tacking on a few more cents per pack is a viable method of revenue collection. Bureaucrats are always very good at deluding themselves.
This is one reason that many people argue that gas taxes should go only toward transit infrastructure: if a state becomes dependent upon a specific type of tax to keep up a revenue stream in its government’s general fund, it inevitably becomes an interest lobby for that particular form of consumption. In terms of gas taxes, if people stop using as much gas and the revenue stream dries up, the logic is that the infrastructure will take less of a beating and thus the funds won’t be needed as badly if that’s all the gas taxes pay for.
If tobacco taxes were being used only to fund anti-smoking campaigns or pay for health care for uninsured smokers, it might not be any more fair or rational a tax, but at least it would be logically utilized, under the assumption that if fewer smokers smoked, and thus less tax was collected, that the consequence would be less need for anti-smoking ads and fewer lung cancer patients in state-funded hospitals. That might be flawed logic to some extent, but at least it’s an attempt at logic.
The general way taxes on specific goods are managed, however, is to tack on special riders every now and then, until eventually most of the tax is essentially just contributing to the state’s general fund, and thus in order to balance the budget, the state must ensure that that good continues to be consumed.
I always wondered at what point the attrition of smokers would reach the threashold where tobacco-tax-dependent governments started to need more smokers and thus stopped insisting on anti-smoking campaigns and laws against public smoking, etc. Maybe that day is near?