In the debate preceding the collapse of a major piece of anti-tobacco legislation the other night, Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader of the Senate, became so angry and so confused that he blurted out that smoking kills 1,000 American teen-agers a day. It does no such thing, of course, seeing as how it ordinarily takes a half-century or so for the addiction to lay someone low. But this inadvertent misstatement should come as no surprise. This whole, vast, cumbersome bill was a gross misstatement predicated on a series of lesser but equally erroneous assumptions.
The biggest fallacy of all was that the legislation would reduce teen smoking by 60 percent. As one reporter found in trying to check the veracity of this figure, it derived not from any study, but from a goal announced in the early going. Somehow this target got confused with the results of some research, which did indicate there would be a drop in teen smoking by raising the price of a pack of cigarettes by $1.10 over five years. However, other, more persuasive research indicated no such thing would transpire, and many social scientists said the bill, at best, would be a shot in the dark.
Another fallacy was that the big, bad tobacco companies would be the only ones paying plenty, when, in fact, those doing much of the paying would be the one-quarter of American adults who happen to smoke. Except for the occasional columnist, hardly anyone bothered to note that these smokers are people, too, not somehow less worthy than the rest of Americans, but decent people, family people, and, as surveys show, disproportionately low-income people.
Whatever its problems, the bill could have passed if the Clinton administration had not grown greedy for its revenues as a source of money for financing politically popular programs, such as child care, and if the Republicans had then not decided to take some of the cash for tax cuts elsewhere. The tobacco companies had agreed to fork over the extraordinary sum of $368 billion to pay for supposed social costs that smoking had not, in fact, generated, but suddenly they were facing enlarged payments of $516 billion and had a chief inducement stripped from them: The Senate had decided not to put caps on damages in liability suits against the companies as had initially been proposed.
When the tobacco companies changed their mind about cooperation, those favoring the bill acted as if it made no difference. The problem was that the tobacco companies then spent $40 million on TV ads lambasting the bill, and it began to look like some in the public had been influenced and might not turn on those opposing this particular bill. A vote that could have led to consideration of the legislation then failed. The Democrats pledge to use that vote against the Republicans in congressional elections, which might work. It shouldn’t. The Democrats and some Republicans also say a similar measure will someday pass. Maybe so, but that won’t mean that all the misstatements would then somehow be correct.
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