Ron Leone, head of the state’s Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association, says raising the cigarette tax is a bad idea for businesses like this one, consumers, and the state.
Credit Elana Gordon / KCUR
Misty Snodgrass, with the American Cancer Society, has been traveling the state in a school bus, in support of a measure that would raise the state’s tobacco tax and direct revenue to schools.
Credit Elana Gordon / KCUR
Misty Snodgrass, with the American Cancer Society, and local school and health leaders gathered in Lee’s Summit earlier this month in support of an effort to raise the state’s tobacco tax.
Credit Elana Gordon / KCUR
Steve Barbour, owner of Cigarettes 4 Less in KCMO, worries about how a tax increase would affect his business, located 80 feet from the Kansas border. Cigarettes are cheaper here than in Kansas right now, but that would change if a tax were approved.
Missouri currently has the lowest cigarette tax in the country. Now, a measure on this November’s ballot proposes changing that, raising it for the first time in two decades.
While supporters of raising Missouri’s cigarette tax wrap up their petition gathering efforts in the next week, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has reaffirmed his distance from the initiative.
Missouri's Secretary of State has now approved more than a dozen petitions related to the taxing of tobacco products. But a lot fewer are likely to end up in circulation, and of those remaining, the aims may be very different.
