San Francisco Mayor Wants to Tax Cigarette Butts

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to tax your butt. You know, the one that makes up roughly one third the length of a cigarette and routinely ends up littering the sidewalk. In an effort to deter smoking even further, and help defray the cost of paying to clean up all the discarded butts from streets and municipal drain pipes, Newsom, who has announced his intention to run for governor in California, would slap an additional 33 cents to the price of a pack of cigarettes.

Needless to say, tobacco companies are not happy with this idea, that makes an already heavily taxed product even more so:

"Obviously we think people should follow the littering laws, in California and elsewhere," said Frank Lester, a spokesman for Reynolds American Inc., the nation's second-largest manufacturer of cigarettes. "But we oppose any additional taxation on smokers to pay for that."

San Francisco is already a pretty tough place to be a smoker. Last year the city by the bay banned the selling of cancer sticks at drugstores. What's next, an outright ban on a product with a proven link to cancer and other diseases that cost the public billions in shared heath care bills?

It is estimated that 4.5 trillion cigarette butts end up as trash on our streets each year. Should San Francisco's City Council approve Newsom's measure, we'll see if it can help alleviate that problem.