A Stitch in Haste

I think there's an unwritten rule somewhere concerning blogging about an op-ed piece that's more than 24 hours old. Still, I didn't want to let this one go unnoticed:

In the late 1990's, the tobacco companies made a historic legal settlement with every state and the District of Columbia, agreeing to pay $246 billion over 25 years for tobacco prevention and cessation programs. In the last five years, the states have received $40.7 billion in tobacco settlement revenue but have devoted only 5 percent of this money to fighting the tobacco epidemic.
...
This lawsuit was never intended to balance ailing state budgets, let alone buy golf carts, cable lines and security cameras. Voters, millions of smokers who want to quit and millions more we want to keep from ever smoking ought to ask their legislators where the money went.

Go read the whole piece and see some of the obnoxious ways activist legislatures are concocting to spend this windfall. Hint: Very little is being used for anti-smoking campaigns.

So, the government receives monies specifically earmarked for a particular purpose, but then decides, "To heck with that, let's spend it on whatever the Politics of Pull, or the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling, or the Politics of Pork suggest we spend it on."

Where have we seen that before?

POST SCRIPT: Here's a delicious conundrum — if private lawsuits against the tobacco companies continue to produce gargantuan awards large enough to endanger the companies financially, they may, unwillingly, default on the Master Settlement Agreement. If they do, then the states, many of which have securitized their shares from the MSA by issuing bonds backed only by those payoffs, could default on the bonds, or, alternatively, be forced to raise taxes to make up shortfalls in the payments from the overlitigated tobacco companies.

I ask again: Where have we seen that before? (See also here.)

Never trust a politician to put off spending on A until tomorrow revenues that can be instead spent on B today.

Never.