Vaping and E-cigarettes use has grown exponentially over the last few years and some legislators are seeing the trend among smokers to use e-cigs to cut down or quit as an easy source of income when they run out of money to spend.
Washington governor Democrat Jay Inslee has proposed a 95 percenttax on anything related to vaping. The same level of tax as on existing tobacco sales. There is only one small problem with that. E-cigs don’t contain tobacco.
“There's no tobacco in our product. There's no combustion created in our product,” said Kim Thompson, owner of the Vaporium in Pierce County to King 5 News of Seattle. “A 95% tax would do a few different things. One, it would demonize a product, make it look as though it was as bad as smoking. The other thing is that it would make vaping and traditional cigarettes more similar in pricing. It would give us less incentive to the smoke to say, hey, give this a try.”
Although the long-term effects of vaping are not fully understood, equating it with smoking, where the effects are known, would have the effect of making it the same in the eyes of the consumer, who checks many e cigarette reviews before choosing a vape. Driving many of them back to traditional smoking.
The governor’s plan might raise an estimated $18 million in new taxes. On the other hand, the additional tax burden might shrink the profit margin of current businesses to the point where they are forced to close which could drive customers back to tobacco cigarettes.
“Taxing small businesses out of businesses is bad business,” said Thompson. “I would be no longer able to afford to pay my employees to continue to help people to quit smoking.”
Inslee is supported in his tax increase by Democrat Representative Reuven Carlyle, whose similar proposal was shot down last year, “…we introduced legislation to bring vaping up to the regular level of other similar products such as snuff and other things. This is just a fairness issue. It's a parity issue. No one is looking to single out vaping, we are just looking to bring it to the same level of taxation of other similar products.”