SOUTH CAROLINA’S economic development strategy historically has relied heavily on advertising our low taxes, and promising to make them even lower for big businesses we’re trying to lure to the state. Special deals that let industrial recruits lock in low property rates for decades remain a key incentive we dangle before them.

The strategy is born of the knowledge that setting a low tax rate encourages people to engage in a behavior that is closely tied to that tax rate.

Conversely, higher tax rates discourage behavior. That’s why every business with a sales tax exemption starts screaming whenever lawmakers talk about eliminating exemptions. It’s why we set our alcohol taxes so high (although, judging from the number of people killed by drunken drivers in our state, perhaps not high enough).

Keep that in mind as the information sinks in that tax increases in Kentucky, Virginia and now North Carolina have left South Carolina with the lowest cigarette taxes in the nation.

This editorial board, along with just about everybody in the state who cares about public health, has long argued that the Legislature should increase the cigarette tax in order to discourage kids from smoking. But frankly, we’ve had the argument all wrong, and that’s clearer than ever now.

The issue isn’t whether the Legislature should take action to discourage kids from smoking; it’s whether the Legislature should stop encouraging kids to smoke.

That’s right: By clinging to their “no taxes” pledges, our legislators and our governor are actively encouraging our children to start smoking, to keep smoking, to doom themselves to lives of addiction and lung cancer and emphysema and depression and anxiety disorders. By trying to “protect” our tobacco farmers at the expense of our kids (as if the amount of smoking done in South Carolina makes any difference in the worldwide demand for tobacco), our legislators and our governor are constantly adding to the $362 million a year the rest of us are already paying in taxes just to provide medical care to the smokers who wind up on Medicaid. Not to mention the other $650 million in medical care that’s provided to smokers through private insurance (which is paid for by everyone who has medical insurance) or by hospital emergency rooms, which aren’t allowed to turn away people who can’t pay for their care, and whose bills the rest of us ultimately pay.

It’s no coincidence that the state that long had the fourth-lowest cigarette tax — and now has the absolute lowest — also has the third-highest rate of teen smoking in the nation. That comes out to 83,000 high school students in our state who are regular smokers — with 11,200 more of them becoming daily smokers every year. Half of those kids will die painful and costly deaths because of their addiction — an addiction our state laws are encouraging.

In a lot of cases, it would be great to be able to declare, “We’re No. 1.” We’d love to be No. 1 in school test scores and graduation rates and job creation and per capita income and life expectancy.

But we’re not. Instead, our new claim to fame is our bottom-dragging cigarette taxes. “We’re No. 1 in encouraging our kids to kill themselves!” Not exactly the stuff of state mottoes.