Konrad Switters
August 28, 2002

If you are reading this, then you have a computer and it is connected to the internet. If you have a computer that is connected to the internet, then it is almost certain that you utilize email on a regular, if not a daily, basis. If you use email on a regular basis, then there is approximately a 90% chance that you make use of either Microsoft Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail as your web-based email service. If you have been utilizing either of these two email services providers for at least twelve months, then there is a high probability that the service you receive from these providers has been reduced substantially during this time period. If you have not had your service reduced during this time period, then it is because you have chosen to pay a fee for what used to be a free service.

If you now pay for what you used to enjoy for free, then you have been slowly lured into a manipulated dependency that amounts to corporate larceny. But you should not feel bad, you are not alone. Approximately 23% of the Population of the United States has succumbed to the same fate. Whether or not any of these 57 million Americans uses email is irrelevant; they are cigarette smokers, and they know only too well about addiction, and the rising costs of their vice. Smoking cigarettes was never free, like full service web-based email used to be, but increased cigarette taxes are providing revenue for state governments in exactly the same way that email service providers hope to produce revenue: by capitalizing on addiction.

The state governments bring in a total of approximately 5.9 billion dollars in cigarette taxes each year. Although all 50 states place taxes on many consumer products to provide revenue for their budgets, cigarettes are taxed at a rate far beyond most consumer goods. Cigarettes have been singled out as an important source of state revenue, under the guise that increased cigarette costs will deter smokers from purchasing cigarettes and thus result in a reduction in the number of people who smoke.

"Governors and state lawmakers are scrambling to plug holes in their budgets with whatever money they can find. Taxing tobacco is becoming very popular," said John L. Kirkwood, President and CEO of the American Lung Association. [1]

At first glance, this appears to be a good idea. The government has used its understanding of supply and demand to tax a product that will guarantee a revenue return; and the product they are taxing has been proven to be dangerous to the health of its users. The logic of the propaganda is flawless: the cigarette tax is a benevolent deterrent. The problem is that cigarette smoking is not distributed evenly throughout the population of the United States. In fact, it is well known that smokers are predominantly low income minorities. Knowing this fact reveals the true nature of the cigarette tax; it is a horribly misguided and morally apprehensible political gesture that amounts to little more than an increased tax on the poor.

People with low incomes buy a disproportionate percentage of all cigarettes sold. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. [2]

According to new data from the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), raising the cigarette tax by $1.10 per pack would increase the federal tax burden on those earning less than $10,000 per year by 44.6 percent by the year 2003. Sixty-one percent of all the new taxes would be paid by those with incomes under $40,000. Meanwhile, those earning more than $75,000 would see a tax increase of less than 1 percent. [3]

Unfortunately, even in light of these staggering statistics, nobody cares. Nobody cares, because nobody can see beyond the propaganda that this tax will reduce lung cancer and other smoking related maladies. The reality is that this propaganda is based on studies which indicate that the, "taxable per capita consumption of cigarettes by adults declined," as a result of the excise tax. What these studies consistently fail to take into consideration [and what politicians outright ignore] is that this "taxable" statistical analysis completely disregards the black market sales of cigarettes, which in places like California, amount to as much as 23% of the cigarette market. [4,5]

I am a nonsmoker. Until recently, I applauded the increase in cigarette costs; but I have recently changed my mind about the reality of the benefits of cigarette taxes. Although, I find it almost completely incomprehensible that a grown adult would make the choice to voluntarily inhale combustible carcinogens into their lungs, I have realized that the political propaganda surrounding the cigarette tax is nothing more than a rhetorical tool for state governments to profit from human addiction. And worse, I have realized that this revenue generation affects poverty level Americans in a way that is as tragic as the cancers they are dying from.

I used to take pleasure in knowing that a pack of cigarettes costs almost as much as a movie theater ticket. I used to think it quite nice that adults who choose to smoke a pack a day will spend several thousand of dollars per year on this offensive and life-threatening habit. And I thought, as politicians have argued [quite unrealistically] that the increased cost of cigarettes alone would cause hundreds of thousands of adults to give up this expensive and disgusting habit. But a woman in Mount Vernon, New York, altered my stalwart position completely.

It was lunch time, and she approached me at a deli checkout counter and asked if me if I was buying food. My initial reaction was to suspect that she was going to ask me to buy her something to eat. This would have made me somewhat uncomfortable, but I'm much more likely to buy a needy person a meal, than I am to give them money. As it turned out, what she asked for turned out to be far more abhorrent. She asked if she could pay for my lunch with her food stamps, and take an equivalent amount of cash from me so that she could buy a pack of cigarettes. She explained that her kids had already eaten that day, so that it was okay for her to be using the food stamps for such purposes. Clearly this woman was addicted in a way that non-smokers and [non-email users] find almost completely incomprehensible.

The malignancy of the mind that must exist to allow such a tax on the poor, is no better than the cancers that it proclaims to reduce. Millions of Americans are now subject to a legislative tax imposed by a government which is now benefiting financially from the addition which it was lobbied by the tobacco industry to ignore for so many years. After disregarding scientific evidence for decades, the benevolent government steps in to encourage its citizens to quit by making cigarettes incredibly expensive. The history of tobacco is a long and lurid tale [6]; but one fact that stands out, is that smoking has been known to be dangerous for over 100 years, and with the health risk it currently poses, it is a wonder why this drug has not been banned. Well its not really a wonder at all; it hasn't been banned because there is money to be made, and lots of it.

Smoking-related diseases claim an estimated 430,700 American lives each year. Smoking costs the United States approximately $97.2 billion each year in health-care costs and lost productivity. It is directly responsible for 87 percent of lung cancer cases and causes most cases of emphysema and chronic bronchitis. [7]

Microsoft claims to have as many as 110 million Hotmail users worldwide [almost twice as many users as the tobacco companies]. Over the last year, it has gone on a relentless service reduction campaign to try to encourage [to be read "force"] its users to pay a nominal fee of $19.95 per year for a service which they used to get for free. Most of the Microsoft coercion campaign consists of the reduction of allowable storage space to 2MB, retraction of POP mail service, and the automatic deletion of "saved mail" after 30 days [of course the announcement of this service change came after its implementation]. Yahoo has undertaken a similar series of service reductions in an effort to magically turn its email market share into a revenue generator.

The revocation of services that had once been offered for free, are meant to sting like trying to quit smoking cold turkey. Just last night, I logged onto my Hotmail account after having not checked it for the entire weekend, and found that the nearly 100 pieces of spam that had found their way into my account [a problem that Microsoft, in its infinite technological wisdom, can't seem to solve even though they are capable of releasing a completely new operating system every six months] had caused a "service suspension" that came along the following helpful notice:

Your account it temporarily disabled because you have exceeded the account size limit for free Hotmail users (2048KB). Please delete messages to regain access to your account within 24 hours or sign up for MSN extra storage.

If you want "more" storage then you need to pay for it, right? That's what Microsoft and Yahoo want you to believe. They're counting on you to shrug your shoulders and tell yourself that this is just the "free market" forces acting like they always do. Remember, no one is forcing you to pay for your email. If you don't like the services, and don't want to pay, you can always cancel your free subscription. This tired old logic only holds water if you truly believe that your rights and privileges are best preserved by the benevolence of corporate hegemony. But why should anyone believe this is the case? If that logic is sound, then why doesn't the government levy a huge gasoline tax and capitalize on America's automobile addiction? Better yet, the government should have car makers pay this tax; they are knowingly selling a product that causes Americans to pollute the environment. A huge tax on gasoline would discourage Americans from driving their gas guzzlers and encourage automakers to develop and produce cleaner burning cars. Then the government could claim to be helping to clean up the environment, and Americans wouldn't have to pay to clean up a problem that automobile manufacturers created. Isn't this just as noble a cause as saving the poor from suffering with cancer?

Oh wait. Did I just call the American infatuation with the automobile an addiction? Addiction is a word seemingly reserved for drug dependence; the relationship between you and your car, or you and your email isn't dangerous, so it couldn't be an "addiction." Right? If it was dangerous, then the government would step in and save you from yourself, or save your environment from the reckless endangerment of companies which produce hazardous products.

In the context of manipulated addiction, the only difference between nicotine and email is that one addiction is much more likely to kill you; but even without the rhetorical propaganda afforded by distinction, Microsoft and Yahoo have levied new fees on their users under the guise that you will get better email service if you pay for it. Wrong. What you will get for your $19.95 is exactly the same service you used to get for free. They haven't had to add anything to your email service in order to solicit your money; they've only had to get you addicted and then rely on your capitalist convictions to convince you that, "you can't get something for nothing." We should all thank Yahoo and Microsoft for letting us have email for free for so long! Their altruistic benevolence brings a tear to my eye.

The conclusion can only be that government agencies are knowingly taxing a product that has been proven to be scientifically addictive, a product whose dangerous health risks they had been lobbied for decades to ignore; State governments know that the demographics of smokers is such that any tax levied on cigarettes will target predominantly the poor. Microsoft's and Yahoo's newly imposed fees for "full service" web-based email is just as insidious. They are targeting a relatively affluent cross section of computer users who can afford to pay twenty dollars a year for their email services; but whether they can afford it or not, is not the issue. The issue is that it should not be acceptable for a corporation like Microsoft or Yahoo to market a low cost [free] product and then capitalize on its success by manipulating users into paying a fee.

In 1988 the Surgeon General officially reported that nicotine was an addictive drug. No such studies have yet been undertaken to study the physiological effects of email, and there probably won't be. If you smoke and use email, you're being taxed twice; if you just smoke and don't use email you're only being taxed once, but your health is at risk; and if you use email and don't smoke, your corporations and their stooge government [your elected officials] would like you to shut up and open our wallet. Well at least you have your health.

Works Cited:

[1] http://www.lungusa.org/press/tobacco/tobacco_021402.html
[2] http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba269.html
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid.
[5] http://www.cdc.gov/epo/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00044337.htm
[6] http://www.tobacco.org/History/Tobacco_History.html
[7] http://www.lungusa.org/tobacco/