The surging popularity of vaping among young Americans is driving lawmakers to use one of their favorite tools to discourage unwanted behavior: taxes.In December, the Massachusetts legislature passed a 75% tax on all e-cigarettes. Twenty states have already done so, along with the District of Columbia
The surging popularity of vaping among young Americans is driving lawmakers to use one of their favorite tools to discourage unwanted behavior: taxes.
A new study suggests that these new taxes have the potential to do just that — by discouraging adult smokers from considering nicotine vaping, a safer way to ingest nicotine, or encouraging vapers to switch to cigarettes instead. The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, examined what happened in Minnesota, one of the first states to impose a steep vaping tax .
It’s possible, they figured, that vaping might encourage more people to smoke, by providing a new way to try nicotine for the first time. It might also cause people who might have quit to just keep smoking, by providing a second way to get nicotine where smoking is restricted. The natural experiment of the Minnesota tax helped them measure what some overall effects really were.
But in general, nearly all public health researchers agree that it’s better to switch to regulated e-cigarettes than to continue smoking cigarettes. They tend to describe a move from smoking to vaping as a form of “harm reduction,” a more safe choice, even if it is not totally safe. Myers supports high taxes on e-cigarettes primarily because he sees them as a good way to discourage young people from starting to use nicotine in the first place. Since vaping products have entered the market in the United States, youth use of them has increased rapidly, outpacing a simultaneous decline in cigarette smoking among young people. Federal officials have described the development as a public health crisis.
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