War between the states over health insurance

There’s another economic angle to the war between high- and low-income regions.

Smokers, many of whom are low-income people, are the ones who would have paid the cost of CHIP expansion under the bill that Bush vetoed.

The bill would have raised to a dollar per pack the current 39-cent-per-pack cigarette tax, a 156 percent tax increase.

Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., one of only eight Democrats to vote against CHIP expansion, represents one of the lowest-income districts in the nation. He said the tax increase was unfair.

“I do have a lot of folks in my district who are not wealthy, and I regret to say a lot of them are smokers,” Taylor said. “This is a tax on the least of us.”

“The headline ought to read, ‘Smokers in America to pay for middle-class welfare,’” said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind.

Is CHIP expansion middle-class welfare, as Pence argues? Is the expansion an attempt by Democrats to woo middle-class voters by extending benefits to them that were once available only to lower-income people?

One Democratic strategist, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rep. Rahm Emanuel, framed the battle as a war Bush was waging on the middle class.

“What I find as a student of politics most fascinating is that in the 1980s the Republicans used to attack the poor,” Emanuel said. “This president has chosen to attack middle-class children getting health care. It’s one of the most bizarre turns in politics that I’ve ever seen.”

Emanuel said Congress is right to extend coverage to middle-class people because “the fastest growth of the uninsured has happened among the middle class.”

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