Obama $0.94 smoke tax a ghost

It’s never going to happen, apparently it wasn’t ever going to.

The cigarette sin tax to generate $78 billion to fund a preschool education program vanished almost as soon as Obama announced it four weeks ago, according to the Washington, D.C.-centered  blog Politica.com

The president hasn’t mentioned it. The White House didn’t coordinate with outside anti-smoking groups, and none of them spent any time pushing for it. Tobacco companies never worried about putting together a lobbying strategy to  kill it. Obama’s political arm hasn’t sent an email calling on Congress to  consider it. Not even Obama’s surgeon general, who calls curbing smoking “the  single most important issue for all the surgeons general of the past five decades,” put out a press release applauding the idea. The whole idea disapeared like a ghost in the night.

That’s the attitude within the West Wing, too — rather than a marquee idea, aides say the $0.94-per-pack cigarette tax was in fact not a priority, and  there are no plans to build a public case for it. The tax was just the most politically palatable idea they could come up with to pay for their big new entitlement program — and in the context of a budget debate they never expected to get serious, that was enough.

“If other people have other ideas, we’re happy to look at them,” a White House official said. “If there were another way to pay for this, we’d be open to  it.”

White House officials described the cigarette tax as incidental to a larger  goal of funding the universal preschool program. And they wouldn’t discuss the proposal Obama called “the right thing to do” on the record at all.