Walking around downtown Mountain View last night, streets littered with cigarette buts, I wondered if there was an elegant way of cleaning the streets. The simple thing to do would be to tax cigarettes even more and use that money to start a city cleaning service, another government bureaucracy that may or may not accomplish what it’s tasked to do. Here’s my idea:

1. Tax $.40 (2 cents per cigarette) more on every pack of cigarettes.
2. Start a collection program, so that for every cigarette butt a person brings in, he/she will get the 2 cents.

While the 2 cents per butt may not be enough money from all the club goers to pocket their butts, it could be a nice source of income for homeless people. Since not all cigarette butts will come back to the collection center either, the money earned from the difference could be used to support the collection program and other anti-smoking initiatives. Of course the implementation would have to be executed cleverly, not setting up any large departments but piggy backing on some existing infrastructure (recycling centers maybe?).

The one possible drawback of this plan is that it might give people the justification to litter, because it’s supporting the homeless. Those people need to realize that they’re the reason such a program exists in the first place. Nevertheless, this would be a much better and effective alternative to Prop 86, which would have inevitably started some illegal cigarette trafficking from neighboring states (wouldn’t you, if you could make close to $4 per pack of cigarettes?).

Labels: cigarette, tax