Congress should end federal tax subsidies for foreign tobacco 

A smart tax system tries to reward virtue and punish vice. That’s why we impose an excise on purchases of things such as cigarettes. We want to discourage people from smoking, and there’s a broad bipartisan consensus that reasonable tobacco taxes make sense to raise revenue and as a public health measure to discourage smoking.

At the same time, the reason we tax imports through excise tariffs is to incentivize Americans to purchase domestic products over foreign goods. But Congress and industry special interest groups have constructed a bizarro tax policy that blatantly violates both these principles. It’s a policy that rewards smoking, tilts the tax system in favor of foreign production, and costs the federal government billions of dollars of taxes owed. All at once!

Fixing

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