DOOLEY: Make smoking cost an arm and a lung

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I have a $10 limit on my indiscriminate impulse purchasing.

This is the genius behind the clearance DVD box at the supermarket, and it’s the only explanation I can find for why I own a CD of t.A.T.u.’s classic single “All The Things You Said.”

My inability to recognize the difference between the impact $5 and $8 will have on my checking account makes me more than willing to hand over my debit card for a pack of cigarettes.

Cigarettes are the most vilified substance of the past 15 years, but they have done everything to earn that reputation. Still, it’s sort of strange that cigarettes are legal at all. This is where myself and plenty of other American smokers need the help of federal regulation.

The cigarette tax is hurting my wallet, but it’s not enough to help me quit on my own. For those of you who suggest I rely on sheer willpower to quit smoking, I recommend you see the damage I willingly inflict on myself at a brunch buffet. Yes, Mom, this is my fourth bacon plate. Happy Easter.

Cigarettes will make you sweaty, yellow toothed, yellow fingered and dead. They will also make you exceptionally poor. I would make a more effective athlete on a Hoveround scootercart after the chimney session I have put my lungs through over the past six months.

Though I have no problem flashing my debit card for anything less than $10, anything over $25 gives me instant pause. This threshold is rarely crossed, except in cases of cable bills, celebratory bar tabs or clearance soccer jerseys. I am an exceptionally unthrifty cheap person; like many of my friends I would much rather buy ten $5 things in a day than a single $30 item.

So, please, take advantage of my poorly wired brain. If I am dumb enough to buy a pack of cigarettes for 30 bucks, then I will cough myself to sleep knowing I made a serious contribution to the local school district that day.

If the cost of cigarettes suddenly turns into the difference between eating dinner for an average worker instead of getting desert, then maybe we will finally face the end of smoking in this country.

At the very least, we will create an incredible revenue stream. The $25 cigarette tax might even make up for corporate loopholes and an illegal war in Iraq, but let’s not get greedy.

Yes, there is a solid argument to be made that incremental cigarette taxes are a regressive tax, that they target the poor. Anecdotally I can tell you truck drivers and machine shop workers are significantly more likely to smoke cigarettes than trust-fund kids who are just “really into yoga now.”

Broke college students, too, seem to never stop smoking.

So let’s stop the cruelty of 25 cent increases people on shoe-string budgets find a way to justify, and let’s just go for it: It’s time to make cigarettes an extravagant luxury.