Governor Charlie Crist says he won?t stand in the way of legislation to raise the state?s tobacco tax. <\/p>\n

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Lawmakers voted to raise the state?s cigarette tax by a dollar a pack earlier this month. Crist has opposed new taxes his entire term as Governor and has the authority to veto the legislation. Surrounded by health care workers at a bill signing ceremony this morning Crist told reporters he likes the plan. <\/p>\n

?Here we?re talking about a hospital and the irony isn?t lost on me. The health care cost that would be saved, and I think obviously a reduction in the people that would smoke, that would be a good thing,? said Crist. <\/p>\n

The tobacco tax is expected to generate 900 million dollars for the state, and keep thousands of teens from ever lighting up. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Governor Charlie Crist says he won?t stand in the way of legislation to raise the state?s tobacco tax. Lawmakers voted to raise the state?s cigarette tax by a dollar a pack earlier this month. Crist has opposed new taxes his entire term as Governor and has the authority to veto the legislation. Surrounded by health […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,22,1,24],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5887"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5887"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5889,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5887\/revisions\/5889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flanews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}