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National Tax Limitation Committee

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This article is part of the Tobacco portal on Sourcewatch, sponsored by the American Legacy Foundation. Help expose the truth about the tobacco industry.

The National Tax Limitation Committee (NTLC) is an anti-tax group formed in 1975 by Lewis K. Uhler, a California native who worked c. 1968-1972 in then-Governor Reagan's "Office of Economic Opportunity." [1] According to its mission statement, the NTLC attempts to limit or reduce taxes by drafting and sponsoring legislation, working to enact term limits, working to enhance the power of the federal executive to limit taxes through support of a line-item veto and training and recruiting of candidates for political office who back its interests. [2]

The NTLC started accepting funding from the tobacco industry as early as 1983 [3] and became a third party contact/ally of the tobacco industry in its efforts to limit state and federal taxes on cigarettes.[4] [5] In 1989 the PR group Keene, Shirley & Associates, working on behalf of R.J. Reynolds, identified the NTLC as a group whose ideology would lend itself to supporting "smokers' rights" [6]

In 1994 Uhler wrote a letter to Geoffrey Bible, Chief Executive Officer of the Philip Morris tobacco company (PM), proposing that PM and the NTLC join forces "to go on the offensive...to force the big-government boys to defend against our initiatives," and "fight on our 'killing ground'." [7] The R.J. Reynolds tobacco company listed NTLC as a third party groups it could reach out to for assistance in 1998 to fight a cigarette tax initiative in California.