Math for dummies time.

Health care to be paid for via tobacco taxes.

Bear with me.

The higher the taxes are, the fewer people seek out tobacco, which means you need to raise taxes more to cover the revenue previously sought.

It begins a cycle of tax hikes, which further drives down the number of people buying the tobacco.

It’s what happened with SCHIP, and the revenues that fall short have to be made up elsewhere.

Making it more difficult still to buy tobacco and sell it legally is all well and good, but tying health care to tobacco revenues is a bad idea because at some point all those shortfalls have to be made up elsewhere in the form of still more taxes.

Hiking taxes into the teeth of a recession is a spectacularly bad idea, and yet it’s the only one Democrats have. Cutting costs doesn’t even enter their rationale.