So Newsom Wants To Charge a Cleanup Fee on Cigarettes? Fine -- But Let's Be Honest: The Only Reason To Do This Is Because Smokers Will Pay, And We Are Broke.

G.B. Trudeau

If Gavin Newsom gets his way, we'll owe Gary Trudeau 33 cents every time we use this picture

San Francisco is not an easy city in which to be a smoker. That's not a bad thing -- but it is possible to be on the side of the angels yet still be disingenuous. For example, last year the city successfully withstood a lawsuit from Walgreens over a San Francisco policy that forbids the pharmacy from selling tobacco -- because Walgreens is in the "health business" -- but let the corner store to Walgreens' left and the Safeway to Walgreens' right sell cigarettes to their hearts' content.

Along those lines, Mayor Gavin Newsom has announced that he plans on introducing legislation that would tack a 33 cent surcharge on every pack of butts sold in the city -- justified by the costs of cleaning them up. Let us go on the record: Good. If the city can squeeze some money out of this, that's great. But, unfortunately, Newsom's rationale isn't the honest "You guys are addicted, you'll pay the money, and we're broke" but is based on the results of the city's latest litter survey. Unless I'm mistaken, the operating theory here is something along the lines of: Cigarettes made up X percent of all the litter we surveyed, we spent Y dollars cleaning up this litter, so we spent X*Y dollars cleaning up cigarettes -- so the numbers were crunched to create a per-pack surcharge that'll generate approximately X*Y dollars (in this case $11 million).

This may be good policy, but it's crappy math. Even if every cigarette magically disappeared tomorrow, city crews would still be spending just as much time cleaning up the streets; extra sanitation workers are not dispatched when Costco has a blowout sale on Benson & Hedges. And if Newsom's logic were practiced fairly and across the board, then virtually any product could be hit with this kind of fee to justify its later removal. How about chewing gum, the product that often comes out No. 1 on city litter surveys? A new surcharge would bring new meaning to the term "Double your pleasure." How about cans and bottles of juice and soda? You bet. That goes doubly for cans and bottles of beer and booze -- not only are the receptacles left around the city, we're stuck power-washing the resultant urine out of vast swaths of San Francisco. Meanwhile, a fee on plastic bags -- sorry, my pet issue -- would make good environmental sense. But we're not doing that because the grocery store and plastic people have more sway than the cigarette people in this state.  

Actually, statewide plastic bag fee legislation uses the same faulty logic as Newsom's proposed cigarette fee ostensibly does -- it simply generates the amount we supposedly pay for plastic bag cleanup by using the simplistic aforementioned equation. But, personally, I'm fine with it. The money generated by charging for plastic bags could be used to buy lottery tickets, and it'd still be worth it. The simple act of having to pay for bags should convince people to bring their own to stores -- and that'll do the environment some good.

Placing a fee on cigarettes will not have that upside -- though it could, theoretically, dissuade people from getting started with the habit. Even still, it'd be hard to predict any city politician going against this. In fact, the only folks quoted in this Times article who are upset, predictably, are cigarette company executives who protest the effect this could have on consumers' wallets; they care so much about those folks that they're selling them a product everyone knows is lethal. What stand-up guys!

So good luck to Newsom and his fee-to-be. Let's hope his number-crunchers factored in the very real possibility of serious smokers simply heading over to Daly City to stock up on cigs. Over there, we hear, they don't have extra fees on cigarettes. They also don't have a $500 million budget shortfall.