In the Spartanburg Herald-Journal/News Channel 7 Voice of the Voter survey, one question was, "Should South Carolina have a higher cigarette tax?" 68 percent responding in the unscientific poll said "yes", 27 percent said "no" and 5 percent were undecided.

The results were very encouraging to Sue Berkowitz of Columbia, who's been working for several years trying to get state lawmakers to raise the cigarette tax. South Carolina's tax of 7 cents per pack is the lowest in the nation.

She wants the tax raised with the extra money earmarked for Medicaid. "We need to find ways to get health insurance to individuals and to families," she says. "The cigarette tax is an excellent way to do it. It would be a user fee on people who are already costing our health care system far more money than they're contributing  into it." 

There have been several attempts over the last few years to raise the cigarette tax, but all have failed in the legislature. Gov. Mark Sanford proposed in 2003 to raise the cigarette tax by 61 cents a pack, but he wanted to use the money to lower the state income tax instead of for health care. He says he would support raising the cigarette tax only if another tax were lowered.

His Democratic opponent for governor, state senator Tommy Moore, favors raising the cigarette tax, with part of the money going to Medicaid and part going to help small businesses provide health insurance for their employees.

But Don Weaver, president of the anti-tax group the South Carolina Association of Taxpayers, says his group opposes the increase. He says raising the cigarette tax might actually bring in less money for the state, because our low tax brings smokers from North Carolina and Georgia across the line to buy their cigarettes. He thinks we should wait a few years to see how much revenue we make from cross-border sales before thinking about a tax increase.

He also doesn't think using a higher tax to spend more on Medicaid is a good idea. "Medicaid is still growing too fast. It's the fastest-growing state program in the state budget. And what we've said is there has to be new limitations on entitlement programs and, until those are done, you could have a tobacco tax increase every year and it still wouldn't solve the problem," he says.