By Robert J. Samuelson

Wednesday, February 25, 1998; Page A17

Anyone proposing stiff taxes on the poor and middle class would, presumably, face an uproar. The right would condemn any increase; the left would complain that the poor were being badly treated. But lo, such tax proposals exist and have barely aroused protest. President Clinton's budget assumes the equivalent of a $1.10 per pack increase in cigarette taxes by 2003. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has a similar plan. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) would raise the tax by $1.50 a pack by 2001. All these proposals raise taxes or induce the cigarette companies to raise prices and turn over the money to government. The effect is the same.

How regressive are these proposals? Well, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that 53 percent of the present federal cigarette tax (24 cents a pack) is paid by taxpayers with incomes under $30,000. Only 7 percent comes from those with incomes over $75,000. Smoking rises as income falls. Under Conrad's proposal, someone who smokes a pack a day would pay $547.50 in added annual taxes. If the smoker made $10,000, that's 5.5 percent of income; at $20,000, it's 2.7 percent.

The smoking debate consists heavily of fictions. Awkward facts are ignored or minimized; dubious assumptions, often clearly false, are advanced as solid truths. Genuine debate is stifled by two propositions: that the tobacco companies are evil beyond belief, and that no measure should be spared to stop teen smoking. The result is the illusion that tobacco companies are being punished for past sins. Concealed is the reality that the costs of any settlement of the states' suits against tobacco companies -- whether imposed by Congress or courts -- will be borne by the 25 percent of adults who smoke.

What's being proposed is a vast income transfer system in which money moves mainly from smokers to others. The others include, most conspicuously, anti-tobacco lawyers. In Florida, some claim $2.8 billion of the state's $11.3 billion settlement; in Texas, they want $2.3 billion of a $15.3 billion settlement. Although final fees haven't been set, they almost surely will total billions. Somehow, this sort of transfer, from $30,000 workers to $300,000 lawyers, does not seem a model of social justice.

The largest transfers, though, involve new government spending. Conrad's plan, for example, envisions $82 billion of new spending between 1999 and 2003. Here's how it would go: $34 billion to states; $17 billion to the National Institutes of Health for research (not necessarily smoking-related); $13 billion for anti-smoking programs (advertising, cessation counseling); $10 billion to tobacco farmers to compensate for losses; $5 billion for Social Security; $3 billion for Medicare.

What justifies taxing smokers to support this spending?

Well, higher prices will deter smoking, which (it's said) hurts society. Smokers have greater health costs that everyone else must pay. Conrad calls his tax a "fee" that would recover these costs. This is a powerful argument whose only flaw is that it's untrue. Studies have shown that, because smokers die younger, they have lower lifetime health costs than non-smokers. The latest study, done by Dutch researchers for the Netherlands and published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, estimates that if no one smoked, health costs would ultimately rise about 5 percent. Also, smokers defray their costs through federal and state cigarette taxes. In a report, economist Jane Gravelle of the Congressional Research Service summarizes:

"Smoking has apparently brought financial gain to both the federal and state governments, especially when tobacco taxes are taken into account. In general, smokers do not appear to currently impose net financial costs on the rest of society. The tobacco settlement will increase the transfer of resources from the smoking to the non-smoking public."

So the central argument in all the cases brought by states -- that smoking raises their health costs -- is false. Similar distortion occurs with secondhand smoke, which is portrayed as a major health hazard and is offered as another reason for taxing smokers. It's true that prolonged exposure to secondhand smoke poses modest health risks. Studies of non-smoking spouses of smokers find that, compared with other non-smokers, they run a 20 percent to 25 percent higher risk for lung cancer or heart disease.

But the added risks of secondhand smoke are not in the same category as smoking. Comparing the two, smokers' extra risks of contracting lung cancer are roughly 40 to 80 times higher. For heart disease, smokers' risks are about 10 times higher. And secondhand smoke studies applied mainly to spouses. It's unclear whether on-the-job exposure ever created similar risks for workers. If it once did, the dangers are now scant. There are too many smoking restrictions. A 1992-93 government survey found that restrictions covered about four-fifths of indoor workers; a later, unpublished survey finds even more. Smokers mainly endanger themselves and their families, not the wider public.

All this is known; indeed, I have reported much of it before. But these issues are largely absent in the smoking debate. Smokers have become disenfranchised and dehumanized; they are non-people. To talk about them would pollute the moral purity of the anti-smoking crusade. Smoking is unhealthy; lowering it among teens would be good. But how much is society entitled to punish adult smokers to protect teens? How much should society discriminate against a large class of people (smokers) whose behavior offends -- but does not threaten or impoverish -- the larger public? And how much can society change teens, who consistently defy what their elders think best?

Hardly anyone asks these questions, because the answers are ambiguous and the very act of asking is politically perilous. It implies that one is either anti-children or pro-tobacco. It's easier to maintain the focus on the big, evil tobacco companies. This sustains the central fiction that the smoking controversy pits good public interest against selfish private interest. What it's actually about is means and ends. Debating this candidly, we might come to a discomforting conclusion: that the ends are desirable but unachievable; and the means are achievable but undesirable. A candid debate, however, is nowhere in sight.