Phony Statistics: On Smoking...

.S. Sen. John McCain’s much-touted anti-tobacco legislation fell apart because of its sponsors’ avarice . What had begun as a $368 billion scheme hatched by tobacco executives and state attorneys general metastasized into a measure that would have cost upwards of $800 billion over 25 years, created at least 17 new federal agencies and granted extraordinary new powers to the Food and Drug Administration — all without significantly curtailing trial lawyers’ ability to sue the bejabbers out of tobacco companies.

   This final provision proved fatal. Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire tied up the Senate last Thursday evening by proposing to lift limits on what trial lawyers could extract from Big Tobacco. That inspired a series of amendments and counter-amendments, and when the dust settled, the honorables had agreed on but one thing. They will not vote on any tobacco legislation before June 2, and the first amendment they will consider would use any and all tobacco-tax money to abolish the marriage penalty now enshrined in federal law.

   For all practical purposes, the grand deal envisioned by McCain and supported by President Bill Clinton is dead. Republican leaders in the House have vowed to permit nothing more than a modest bill to combat teen smoking — and have made it clear they will not accept any tax increases.

   That’s good. The tobacco bill itself was a huge fraud, based on false premises and predictions concocted out of thin air.

   The New York Times blew the whistle on the enterprise when it reported that most of the statistics bruited about by sponsors of the measure are bunk. Sen. McCain, R-Arizona, has been claiming, for instance, that 3,000 kids a day start smoking. There is no serious statistical analysis to back his claim.

   Ditto for the White House’s assertion that every 10-percent increase in tobacco prices would produce a 7-percent reduction in the number of children who smoke. The little available research on the topic comes from England and the Netherlands, and it suggests that price hikes may produce a mild increase in the number of youthful smokers — probably because it makes the behavior seem more thrilling and illicit. The only difference is that the young smokers consume fewer cigarettes per day.

   As for the American Cancer Society’s claim that legislation would cut teen smoking by 60 percent, Dr. Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, told the Times: “They basically made up the numbers. ... It is like assuming that by snapping our fingers we could make breast cancer go away.”

   Let’s face it: The tobacco bill was a way to turn an unpopular industry into a treasure chest for politicians who wanted to spend a lot of money and make major contributors happy. It seems odd that Sen. McCain, a sponsor of campaign-finance reform legislation, wouldn’t get the irony: His tobacco bill invites the very sort of corruption that has disabled the political system.

   Congress ought to stick to the basics: Keep whittling taxes. Stop writing pestilential new rules and regulations. And whenever the impulse to spend a trillion dollars arises — leave town and let your constituents tell you what they think of the idea.