Tobacco Documents Online

''- FELLO W' TAXPAY- ERS: If you are a cigarette smoker or user of other tobac• co products it m a y interest , you tb know '. you are con• tributing more than $2 billion Micke a year in ex- y cise taxes to the treasury of. Uncle Sam: + And if you like to have the amount collected ex: plained! In more simple terms it means $23t1;3'17.72 In tobacco taxes for everT hour-day and night-last year..In addition to the tax bite tsken, by Uncle S,aeq tobacco users last year paid over $1 billion in state and city, excisses. + + + CoII1fiLlluDUS:' Year in and yearout; with unbroken regularity,, tlse U.S. government has been col- lecting tobacco taxes for the past century - and frequent- ly steaping up the tax rte: Tobacco, therefore, is one off the few aovernment revenue prodimers with such a Ion& contin.wuc record. t + + + t + ; $/jllOnS: The total federal .~. excises collected ba tbbacco since 1863 come to - 540:6 billion-a figure exceedL ed only`by excises on alcoholic beverages, which totaled $42.2 b i l l i o n, Licensed beverages tirat were taxed under the, same Civil' War statute. Taxes on playing. cards and some business transactions, w h i c h *nre on the books at an early -dite, were dropped for awhile after the Reconstruction. Period.. Tobacco taxes and the la- ternal Revenue Service were bocn together in 1862 to help finance the Civil War. Amdi e a c h succeeding war has brought a sizeable increase n in the ci;.rette tax. Accorsf& ing to research conductedi by the Toba co Institute, since the ivil War tax act there have been 12increases In the federal tax rate ose oigarettes., The most recent was the "temporary" addin tion of I cent per pack of 20 cigarettes at the outset ot the Korean War. cod3537g'(A + ;' Most other excise taxes on everyday Items have been levied sporadically-general- ly in wartime - and somee have been rescinded. Com- pared to tobacco, excise taxes paid on such "luxury" Items as jewelry, women's handbags, coshietics, furs, etc., are "J o h n n y-come- latelles." They have been l e v i e d continuously only since 1942 and for some the tax rates have since been lowered. + + + Since the World War I' era, cigarettes have greatly out- stripped other tobacco prod- -ucts in the amount of revenue paidi to the government. Cig- arettes were such a novelty in 1862 they were excluded from the f i r s!t tobacco tax -schediile; Two years later a tax of'T cent per package of' 25 was levied on packs selling -tor 5' cents. + GOJng Up-. In 1865, the ~~ rate went t~o 2.4 cents per pack of 20, and in 1867 it was advanced to 10, cents. The ircrease nearly killed off the new industry. In 1868 cigarettes were separ- ately classified and Congress, n!+ticing, the dinrinishing re- turns; cilt the tax to 3 cents a pack. Then in 1919 the rate became 6 cents; in 1940 it rose to 6.5 cents and sincee the "temporary" increase in 19'51 it has bcen 8 cents. + : T Last year, while - consu- mers were paying $2 billion in U.S. excise taxes on cig- arettes and tobacco, they paid only $29 million in, ex- cise on furs, $68' million, on ltather g o o d s,$'1,68 mil- lion on jewelry, and $131 million on cosmetics a n d toilet preparations. All of which addfr up to the factt that $2' billion seems like a whale of a lot of taxes going up In(smoke. I4EWB Indianapolis, Indiana October 15, 1962 InInocent Bystand'er ~..__ I I i e 11A . JA 1V1I E Saturday Scrapphe OUR FRIEND DAN MeKAIlV, the peerless taker, has photographed a sight we hope he Life or the Literary Digest or some other and scoundrels had better lay (or is it lie?) It is a wild doe mule deer that has taken on a pony farm not very far from here. A mule deer - which you no doubt know as the odbcolleus hemionus-hass large ears and she cieighs about 90 ryounds. She spends most of her time in a smalll woods on the pony farm, and Dan says she is the delight of the children and others irl the community. We think maybe there is a very brief' open season on deer in Ohio, but Randall Mell, the Pierre Township police officer, has appointed himself as this deer's personal bodyguard'. * •k * Sr .ch .C... * iF k IF YOU think that's arful, ponder this statist'ie: The na- tion's smokers pay $250,000 an hour in tobacco taxes. No spaniel, can make thFt statement. Indeed„the annual spaniel, tax ain't very mi,,ch. pltcher: ~ sells;to`o market,~ off of whiieh; v ce~~ up residen - .~...t...t:~ t:.:... ~o~us competition ... Up in smnker The nation s ~ lnokers pay more than $230,000 an hour in ,tobacco taxes, indlOstry statisticians note. .ww~