John Ashcroft

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. This is a very good question. I thank the Senator for asking it. These are hardworking people, struggling. They get up early in the day, work late at night, sometimes rely on friends and relatives to help care for their children. Sometimes they can afford day care; sometimes they can't. But, basically, this is a bill which says we are going to take their money and we are going to spend it in this kind of bureaucracy. As I indicated, some of these bureaucracies are relabeled and they are not constituted independently anymore. Some of these are constituted only by virtue of the fact that they are authorized for a Secretary, a Cabinet Secretary, to appoint. But, by and large, in the grand scheme of things, this is a situation where the money goes; it does not come. And the money --there is no specific indemnity for individuals who are the people who are hit by this tax. I know of nothing in this bill that says, for people who have a very serious consequence as a result of this tax, we are going to mitigate it in some way. It is simply not there. Frankly, we have to be honest. The proponents want to impose this tax to make it very difficult for people to smoke. But for people who are addicted, it will be more difficult for them to stop. And that is why they can presume that we will be collecting these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.

Mr. ASHCROFT. The Senator from Missouri will yield for an administrative question on the presumption and understanding that I retain the floor after the question has been asked.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I do.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I will yield.

Mr. ASHCROFT. If the Senator is talking about the opportunity to curtail debate and schedule a motion to table, that is one of the reasons I felt like I had to move to provide the kind of debate which I have provided, because without consultation, at least with me, about a timeframe for the debate suggested, there would be a motion to table. And that happened in the last issue I was seeking to discuss in the Senate. I purposely wouldn't allow individuals to cut off debate. There is a lot of interest in this measure. I will personally do what I can to wrap up my participation. I will limit the amount of questions to which I will respond and make time available for others.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I do.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I would like to yield to the Senator, but I am in the midst of yielding for questions to the Senator from Utah. I want to persist in that line of questioning. So I reassert my right to the floor. If the Senator from Utah was asking me a question, I would ask him to request that I yield for the purpose of a question.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I will yield with the understanding that my right to the floor is not forfeited to the Senator from Iowa. privilege of the floor

Mr. ASHCROFT. I think we have a major problem on our hands. I am not concerned about piling on the companies--I am concerned about piling on the consumers, or piling on the poor people of America a tax burden which they should not be asked to carry for reasons which I think are inadequate to justify.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I ask unanimous consent of the Presiding Officer that our colloquy not be interrupted by these other proceedings, and that the other proceedings be printed suitably at the end of the questioning.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the remarks of the Senator from Arizona not interrupt the questions of the Senator from Utah in the Record. I am pleased to yield to the Senator from Utah for a question.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I am aware of that statement and I happen to agree that there is a very serious constitutional problem with this kind of limitation, even of commercial speech.

Mr. ASHCROFT. If that is a question, I am aware of that fact.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I think that has been a very clear experience. This precipitous increase in the rates of taxes on cigarettes has been a very sad experience by promoting black markets. Great Britain, or England, is said to have a black market of about 50 percent of all of its consumption. That is obviously something we don't want to teach or institute in this country. And other countries--Canada had a serious, very, very serious, bad experience with its precipitous rise in the increase of taxes on these kinds of products.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I think that is an appropriate question. There is almost a 50-percent increase in funding for the FDA. Or did the Senator say more than that? Frankly, I have every confidence that Federal agencies will spend the money you give them. As I indicated, General McCaffrey indicated that there are at least, according to his numbers--and the numbers have been tossed around--more kids are trying drugs than they are trying tobacco. I think we ought to be careful that we don't aggravate that problem.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Yes. I have pointed out that not only would elevated activities in black-market sales result in perhaps even lower prices for cigarettes, but it could, as a matter of fact, be a way in which individuals are introduced to drug use.

Mr. ASHCROFT. As a matter of fact, I have been speaking about that. I indicated that this was the chart and these functions remain. But very frequently, instead of the bureaucracy still being there and labeled and identified, you have a transfer from the bureaucracy to something that you just ask the Secretary to do. For instance, I have just been talking about the transition from the international tobacco control trust fund, and in its place the new bill has ``the Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to establish.'' So instead of actually establishing, you just authorize that a bureaucrat establishes it. You get it out of the bill, but you still have it in terms of consequence, and you still have all the money available to be spent for the same purposes. That is my understanding of what has happened here, and you are going to have $35 million each year for the first 5 years, and then such funds as may be necessary for these international activities. So I am aware of the fact that the bureaucracies were taken out of the bill ostensibly, but I am also aware of the fact that what you let go out the front door it looks to me like you bring back in the back door, because the Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to establish--it is not in the bill anymore, but the Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to establish an international control awareness effort, and that is basically for the same purposes.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Obviously, if we were to take cigarette smuggling, which is now a commercial activity--the cigarettes are largely delivered to stores and are sold in the ordinary course of business. If we were to take that out of the commercial activity arena and put it into the retail activity, so that they would be sold on street corners by drug dealers or others who would sell contraband in a retail fashion, I think we threaten substantially the young people of this country with the introduction in an array of things that would be sold. Someone might offer: Now, you can either have cigarettes here or the marijuana here or these pills here, or like that. So, putting cigarettes into that setting may be a very evil sort of introduction of those individuals to the drug culture in a way that they would not otherwise be exposed.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Yes. I believe a one-pack-a-day habit in participating in smoking would cost an additional $547--if you had three packs a day, it takes you to about $1,600. Money that is taken from the family. It does not matter how much the family makes. It could be very low income. Most smokers tend to be in the low-income areas. So it is a very, very aggressive tax on low-income America.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Well, right here under the new plan it is projected to almost 60 percent.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I am pleased to be made aware of that by the Senator from Utah.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Obviously, they could be forced into all kinds of reliance on outside sources. With the stress that would happen to a family that lost $100 a month by virture of this kind of massive Federal tax on the family, who knows what happens even in the way the family is composed in a setting like that because financial stress is a big part of the challenge to families generally. This is an anti-family measure. This takes from families a very serious proportion of the resources they use to care for one another. And when we say that Government wants this money so badly it will take it from you, and we know you are going to pay it because you are addicted and can't stop, we have really allowed the greed of Government to overtake us. And to say to families, it doesn't matter about you, we are so interested in doing what we want to do--and it does shock me that we are going to spend this money overseas, keeping data about the costs of smoking overseas. I just can't imagine how many folks in Arkansas or my home State of Missouri, who are earning $30,000 or $10,000 or $15,000, would want to make these kinds of payments so they could keep track of the costs of smoking in foreign jurisdictions. That is mind-boggling.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I think it is clear that there has been inadequate examination. This bill hasn't had the kind of scoring that normally attends a bill. This bill was rushed and changed. The ink was not dry on the changes when the bill was submitted. Virtually no one had read the entire bill when it was offered. And we are now in this debate on the bill. And that is why I am willing to take the kind of time we are taking to discuss it. It was suggested yesterday that this massive tax increase would be concluded, that we would know what we were going to do on it because they were going to have a motion to table, and that motion to table would end this debate. I just do not think when you have this kind of massive Government--a 17-agency creation; $868 billion--that you rush through. I think it is clear we need to have the kind of thorough discussion, discussion that would allow us to debate the issues.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record.

Mr. ASHCROFT. My encounter has been this: First of all, the bill is not raised, but when people find out that instead of punishing the tobacco companies, we are taxing tobacco users, so that an individual who earns less than $30,000 a year, if he is a two-pack-a-day smoker, he is going to pay an additional $803 in taxes, they don't understand that. They say, ``Wait a second, if you are trying to punish evil tobacco companies, if that is your objective, punish the companies but don't punish hard-working Americans who are struggling to make ends meet.'' My phones have begun to ring when people began to understand that this is not a circumstance where we are going to try to punish the tobacco companies to that extent. The real punishment comes because this law requires--this law forbids the tobacco company from taking any of this tax out of its earnings--it requires the company to ``pass it on.'' What is interesting, it is even more anomalous than that. The tobacco company collects this $109 billion in the next 5 years, or whatever it is, and turns it into the Government, and we give them a tax deduction for it so that they end up having a $36 billion subsidy that comes back for their having, basically, been involved in the collection of this sum of payment to the Government. My own view is that when people find out this bill really is a bill against hard-working Americans and it is a tax measure, that is when we are going to start hearing more about it. People thought this was antitobacco. There are some things in the bill that distress the tobacco companies, but, frankly, I am more distressed about what we do for them--shutting down their liability, cutting it off. I think it is wrong to say that there is a certain amount that they can be liable for and no more. You don't have any guarantees against lawsuits as a citizen. If you do things that are wrong, people can sue you. There is no limit to what can be collected against you if you do things that are wrong. This bill puts clear limits in for the tobacco companies, basically saying no matter what you do, you can only have this much money awarded against you in court. So no matter how many people are affected, whether it is cancer or emphysema, lung disease, heart disease, no matter how much it is that the courts might allocate against you, we are going to lock down the thing in this bill, we are going to provide a limitation. Some people don't understand. Originally, they thought this was anti- tobacco companies, and the companies are upset with them, but there are lots of things in here which are procompany and they are really anticonsumer.