President Clinton's alcohol and tobacco taxes - 18 June 1993

This time of year the republic resounds with graduation, or as they're called, commencement ceremonies, what we used to call speech day, all across the land. Not just universities and colleges of every kind, but all high schools.

Parades of every 17-year-old who came through with a passing mark, in a rented nylon gown and a cardboard mortar board. Long parades, the distribution of scrolls to everybody, in most places a commencement address, an uplifting speech – usually a recital of stunning platitudes – and then, as the parade patters out, a solemn tune, which I discover, most graduates of high schools anyway, take to be some very old school song and what do you suppose it is? A majestic tune with a heavy beat, played in some places with solemn respect and a respectable band. In some country schools it's heroically strangled by two trumpets, a flute, a fiddle and a trombone. Nothing less than Elgar's great march from Pomp and Circumstance, known to generations of Britons as Land of Hope and Glory.

At one or two recent graduations I've asked a pupil or two which land they had in mind, whose bound they wanted to see set wider and wider. Seriously, I wasn't as cruel as that because I could have foreseen the utter blankness of their reaction. But it was news to me, and to them, that they were begging to have the British empire expand and expand till it took in most of the world, including, who knows, the former American colonies, which Edmund Burke and even Doctor Johnson thought were lost, in the first place, by sheer stupidity.

Well, I was not, the other evening, at a graduation ceremony or even at the following dance. I was at a kind of event that also flourishes in the spring in every city in America, much to the credit of the people who organise these events – a fundraising dinner. This past week or two and well into June, there must be thousands of such dinners, at which the guests pay alarming mounts to occupy a table for six or eight, and I'm talking about five or ten thousand dollars a table. So in these hotels usually famous men and women – from the castle to the ghetto or what we used quaintly to call every walk of life – will rise to a riffle or a flourish from the man in the background and they will plead eloquently or simply or funnily. The 90-year-old Bob Hope is a regular at these ceremonies, on behalf of the hospital or maintaining the park or cleaning up a neighbourhood or subsidising a housing plan in a slum or building a new day-care centre or helping the sick, the lame, the disabled, the poor.

There are still legions of comfortably-off Americans and I'm not thinking about the very rich, who still feel a regular obligation to comfort the afflicted and they do it by these charity drives which in the spring often take this form of a big subscription dinner. Now I know this is done in other lands but the subscription, the contribution is a charity and so exempted from taxation. Dare I say, I will, that I think one of the worst laws ever passed since the Second World War in one of my favourite countries, was the law abolishing tax deductions for charitable contributions. In the result, I gather from my stealthy enquiries, that what it has done to two generations, has been to stifle the impulse which I believe is a natural and a good impulse, to do something on your own, from your own pocket for your neighbour. I suppose the underlying comfortable assumption of this ban is that big daddy, the government, will do it anyway, which we know all too well, from the experience of Sweden and the Netherlands, to go no farther, it can do only in part.

The same impulses that work in, what in this country is known as public television, started 30 years ago as a national alternative to the commercial networks and stations, public television has over 300 city stations in its network. It gets a small subsidy of a few millions from the government and it depends regularly on corporations, big firms who financially back certain regular programmes and forgo a commercial. But many, many stations on the public network could not survive were it not for a couple of million viewers, who send into their local station $15, $20, a hundred, a thousand, anything. About a quarter of the entire revenue of the public television system comes from viewers who wish to help and most, an interesting statistic, from middle and working class families, from people send in once, twice a year, $15 or $20 at most.

Well I was at this charity dinner the other night, as I say, and towards the end I stood up and squinted through a blazing spotlight at an audience in this great ballroom and what I noticed first would have been noticeable in a thousand other such events, in hundreds of American cities, namely, across this ocean of glistening faces, about two thousand of them, not a rising plume of smoke, not a whiff, nobody – and it's the same everywhere you go.

Since I last reported on San Francisco's initiative in banning smoking in all offices and public buildings, the airports have now fallen into line. I know a lady who smokes very little, but she insists on that very little and looking around a few weeks ago in a huge airline building at Kennedy airport, looking around for the usual sign marking smoking area, she couldn't find it and checked with the girl at the check-in counter. Where, she asked, can I smoke? Outside the building, madam, said the cool one. So the old lady took back her ticket, her boarding pass, tramped off a mile through security, out and out on to the sidewalk, puffed away briefly and 20 minutes later, was back at the departure gate, having made her point – which is simply that she's not going to have the government telling her what's good for her. Now all United States post offices have joined the ban.

You'd think that President Clinton, remember him, would be happy as a clam with this general movement. He's eager to raise money in his coming budget package from what have become known as sin taxes. Tobacco, alcohol are the favourite targets of non-sinners. Now Mr Clinton, as you may have noticed, has a habit of thinking up many aspects of many policies, all at once. He is, you know, very inquisitive, very well-informed and since well before his inauguration had spend days and nights going into things more diligently, more exhaustively than any president I can think of. However, he tends not to check first with the senators and the lobbies and the businesses that might oppose him. Now President Reagan had a few simple, strong convictions. He stayed with them, he left his Cabinet and his aides and his allies in Congress to go ahead and do all the spade-work and he went off sawing trees or riding his nag or just having a television supper. But in the strange chemistry of leadership, these greatly-mocked habits made him no less of a leader as strong and persuasive as Franklin Roosevelt.

Well, now Mr Clinton first announces there are going to be sin taxes. So then the distillers and the importers of hard liquor raised Cain, if you'll excuse the pun, and good people raised the spectre of Prohibition and the hard liquor people have other interests, other mergers, so the president quickly backed off hard liquor. What about beer? Even beer ads are allowed on television. Good, so the president announces he's all for a beer tax. Then he hears from his chief whip in the House, whose constituency is St Louis, the capital, practically the vat of the beer industry. Whoa, Dobbin. Other brewers from other states called their Congressmen. The president was only now astonished to discover the size and tenacity of the beer lobby and how many Congressmen it knew on the House Ways and Means Committee.

So how about a cigarette tax? Only one American in four, and it will soon be one in five, smokes, so that should be safe enough. An immediate outcry from the four senators and many congressmen in the states of North and South Carolina, add also a Virginian or two. Why? North Carolina, chief crops, tobacco, soya bean, corn, South Carolina, chief crops, tobacco, soya bean, corn, cotton, Virginia, chief crops, tobacco, soya bean, peanuts. And even up in New England, just across from me, across Long Island Sound, surprisingly Connecticut, chief crops, vegetables, sweetcorn, tobacco. The senior senator from South Carolina thundered to the effect that a cigarette tax would throw out of work half a million farmers in three states. The problems is essentially the same as that of the farmers of Colombia and Peru. Sure, the coca leaf produced cocaine. So find us another crop to keep us alive.

In a more personal way there was a touching irony. In a university town in South Carolina, Clemson. Clemson University officials have just announced that they are ordering a ban on all smoking in all university buildings except dormitories. The big neighbouring tobacco growers immediately suggested they might withdraw scholarship funds amounting to over a quarter of a million dollars a year. One of the largest of them, bearing the euphoniously historic Southern name of John Monroe Holliday said sadly, I co-operate in so many ways with the university but if they take my bread and butter away, it's going to be a different story.

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