Our state is lagging behind. Missouri has the fifth-highest smoking rate in the nation, the 11th-highest rate of lung disease and spends more than $500 million of taxpayer money funding treatments for tobacco-related diseases under Medicaid every year. Missouri has the 39th lowest life expectancy in the nation, with tobacco related illnesses, such as heart disease, crippling Missourians’ health. All the while, we continue to make cigarettes more accessible with the lowest tobacco tax in the nation. Missouri hasn’t raised its tobacco tax since 1993, the longest period of any state.
As the budgetary slice of pie dedicated to Medicaid continues to grow, the slice reserved for higher education in Missouri continues to shrink. Only three states in the union fund higher education at a lower level per capita than Missouri. In 1982, the state provided 64 percent of higher education operating budgets; today, it provides only 36 percent. Over the same period, the burden placed on students has almost doubled from 27 percent to 48 percent of the operating budget.
As students, we see a population more concerned with the cost of its cigarettes than the cost of education. We see a state facing budgetary criticism, but which is still unwilling to consider an increase in any sort of tax. Education, especially higher education, is an economic driver for Columbia, for the state of Missouri and for the nation.
On Tuesday, Missourians will make a choice: protect the quality of education, or defend cheap tobacco. What do we want driving Missouri’s economy: Bootleggers crossing the border to buy and resell our underpriced cigarettes? Or high-quality and marketable graduates, the kind our well-funded peer institutions produce every year?
A leading argument against Proposition B is that it targets tobacco users to solve a statewide problem. It does. Yet, we support tobacco users with our tax dollars every year when we pay for Medicaid to treat tobacco-induced lung cancer and heart disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each cigarette pack sold costs an estimated $10.47 in future health care. Tobacco users cost the average Missourian household $565 in public expenditures each year. Proposition B only begins to balance the equation.
A vote for Proposition B is a vote for the health of our youth, the quality of our schools, and the strength of our economy. It is a vote that affirms the importance we place in education and our state’s future.
—Steven Dickherber, Class of 2012
sjdrh6@mail.missouri.edu
—Ben Levin, Class of 2014
bnlf3d@mail.missouri.edu
University of Missouri
