Alexandra Tashman: Proposed tobacco tax won’t solve higher education’s funding crisis

If Californians want to reinvest in public higher education, they’re going to need to look further than the bottom of a cigarette carton for a solution.

Yet that’s exactly what the California Residents College Accessibility and Affordability Act of 2014, a proposed ballot initiative that could hit the polls next November, would do.

Supported by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the bill’s premise is to raise the state tax on tobacco products, both for consumers and vendors. The increased revenue, which doesn’t yet have a fixed rate, would then be used to fund public higher education by providing more money for “California’s tuition assistance program,” according to the current proposal.

California’s tobacco tax rate ranks 33rd in the country and has not been raised since 1998, which puts it at an oddly low level for such a progressive state. While it would be easy for anyone who is a fan of lower tuition levels to be in favor of raising the tobacco tax, this proposal is not the right way to go about fixing either problem.

This initiative unfairly burdens the state’s tobacco consumers with the financial mismanagement of California’s higher education system. Regardless of your stance on tobacco use, the product has nothing to do with California’s fiscal crisis. To place the economic burden of the system’s failings onto tobacco consumers – many of whom may have no ties to California higher education and already support it with their income tax – is unethical and unequitable.

To ask tobacco consumers to fund higher education when all University of California campuses aim to be smoke-free by 2014 is a remarkable slap in the face to a group of people using a legal product.

Additionally, this proposal is illogical because it places the burden of funding on a type of income that is decreasing. Fewer people smoke every year, and higher tobacco taxes supposedly disincentivize people from even starting. This source of revenue is declining, and it will only continue to shrink, should Californians vote to enact the higher tax.

If the tobacco tax increase went toward health research about smoking, like last year’s failed Proposition 29, which proposed putting this revenue toward cancer research, a stronger moral argument could be made.

“(This proposal) creates the illusion of solving the problem, but it’s a convenient political excuse for not dealing with funding issues,” said Stanton Glantz, professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.

While Glantz – whose research centers on the dangers of tobacco – has been supportive of previous tobacco tax initiatives, he is an opponent of this most recent tobacco tax.

“This is really unfair because you’re taking smokers – a small minority of the California population – and placing the responsibility on them for something that’s completely unrelated to tobacco use and smoking,” Glantz said.

Trying to address the underlying issues of higher education’s funding crisis and helping people quit smoking are two distinct problems, which cannot be addressed by randomly forcing them together in an ill-advised initiative. Such a surface-level formula that arbitrarily couples a societal good with a societal ill doesn’t adequately address either issue.

Until comprehensive reform is undertaken, higher education in California will struggle to make ends meet. No amount of smokers in the state can fix higher education’s fiscal instability.

If California really wants to reinvest in the quality and accessibility of public higher education, we should look to more realistic and plausible solutions.

Email Tashman at atashman@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu or tweet us @DBOpinion.