To continue reading up to 10 premium articles, you must register , or sign up and take advantage of this exclusive offer: I thought David Collins was joking when I first started reading, “ Dan Malloy’s cruelest tax ,” , which is a proposal to raise cigarette taxes 45 cents a pack. I really thought it was a joke when I read, “Some studies show that some poor, addicted cigarette smokers pay up to 25 percent of their income on smoking,” and that by raising cigarette taxes would tie Connecticut with New York for the highest in the country at $4.35 a pack, targeting the people who can least afford it, addicts no less.