Who do people still smoke? It's been know to cause cancer for 50+ years and is expensive. It's not like the education isn't there (I've seen anti-smoking ads on TV for the past 10 years and at the theater before seeing a movie).
Just like alcohol, it seems to be people that willingly want to be taxed.
Wrong question...
Why do people continue to start smoking?
I grew up in the US in the 80s and 90s, where we were bombarded with anti-smoking ads, the health effects were well known, and the prices were high.
It blows my mind that I have peers who smoke. They would have seen the same ads, had the same facts available, and mostly come from similar backgrounds (middle-class).
I started in high school because of peer pressure. I've since quit, but I think that the majority of people that start only do so because their friends do.
Plus, smoking a cigarette feels really good. Once you're addicted, they don't, but until then they just feel really nice.
Nicotine is a stimulant that elevates the mood almost like magic.
The numbers are particularly telling if you look at schizophrenia sufferers. People with schizophrenia are about 2.5 time more likely to smoke than people without.
A ton of factors, but there is some reason for hope. The smoking rate among US adults has been dropping at about 0.5% per year more-or-less consistently for decades, and is currently well under 20%! The ads, regulations, and outreach you're talking about are working, but major societal change is slow. Remember, in the 50s, the smoking rate was nearly 50%! Dropping that rate by half in less than one lifespan is pretty good, I think.
Because addiction has very little to do with the substance itself, and it is mostly a coping mechanism to deal with many of the issues people of all social strata can face: traumas, broken homes, lack of self-realization, isolation, etc...
Have you met people? Can you name a topic where ad campaigns and available facts have been 100% persuasive? It just doesn't work like that. For one thing, people are bad at assessing abstract risks--they figure it won't happen to them, or something else will get them first. Especially since most smokers start young, at a time when they're _especially_ bad at making these kinds of decisions (and the tobacco industry counts on that).
Have you ever done something that's bad for your health in the long term because it feels good /now/? Like, I dunno, eating fast food, drinking soda, drinking alcohol? Stayed up too late browsing the Internet?
While most of these are far less severe than smoking (perhaps obesity, drinking give it a run for its money), all of them are bad for our health in the long term and we know it, but we do it anyway. There's plenty of information out there to know about it, it's not like people don't know alcohol or burger king is bad for you. So why do people do it?
When you answer that question you'll have the answer to your question.
A lot of especially young people just plain do not care what happens to them when they are 70.
"I started smoking when I was a kid, like when I was ... like 14 and I thought, "I'll look really cool if I start smoking." Because I didn't get along with anybody. So, I started smoking, and wouldn't you know it? I did look cool! All of the sudden, all these broads liked me and everything. Not broads, but ladies, girls, whatever."
Story time! I smoked my first cigarette when I was 20. I was living in chicago, and at the time I was homeless and had spent about an hour and a half sitting on one of the train stops contemplating jumping in front of one. Obviously, I was looking a bit distraught, and a woman came up to me to ask if I was alright. I said I was fine, and she offered me a cigarette. I figured at this point, who cares. I was literally about 10 feet and an impulse away from killing myself, so I accepted. I was able to resist that particular impulse, but the anxiety and depression have more or less followed me. I continued smoking, and my daily use has varied, and even ceasing periodically for months at a time. But I find myself turning back to smoking at times when I am so anxious and depressed that I really want to die. It helps me to calm a little, and placate the suicidal impulse long enough to pass.
Because tobacco smells and tastes nice (cigarettes mostly don't, but cigarettes are to the tobacco world as McDonald's is to the hamburger world). It stems the appetite and heightens the mind.
Addiction isn't that predictable. Lots of people can drink regularly and stop when they want to, lots of people can do cocaine a few times and not get addicted. That doesn't mean alcoholism and cocaine addiction don't exist.
You're right! Now that we have one single data point, we can make a generalization about cigarette addiction as a whole! And now we can just forget about the many decades of research ACS and other organizations have done tracking millions of smokers around the world, because you are the only data point we need!!
By that logic I can say because I've been drunk a number of times in my life but are in control of the substance, I think alcoholism is blown out of proportion.
I had an operation where I was given intravenous morphine once. When I got out of the hospital I wasn't jonesing for opiates. I think opiate addiction is just blown out of proportion.
Building tolerance and addiction is highly dependant on the individual, and so is quitting. Besides there's a difference between "a couple packs" and a long term smoking (at which point you're not yet that much addicted but smoke due to different reasons and get addicted in the meantime).
You smoked a couple of packs of cigarettes and quit. Are you implying that because you had such an easy time quitting, everyone else should too? That would be anecdotal, don't you think?
Coming from someone who used to smoke 2 packs a day, the addiction wasn't from the cigarettes themselves. It was from the life I had. I was depressed, had a dead end job, a shit relationship, family problems, etc. I tried to quit a number of times, but had many difficulties due to the fact that everything around me was constantly on fire.
I finally quit when things picked up. It was still a challenge going from around 40 cigarettes a day to none (cold turkey), and I ended up saying some things I definitely shouldn't have in the process, but I did it.
It's a similar story for many smokers. Also, if anything, it was blown out of proportion in the 90's. Things seem to have calmed down since then.
Tobacco activates the pleasure centres of the brain. Just like food, sex, drinking, or some illegal drugs. So you get a "reward" each time you partake, with smoking being particularly rewarding.
A lot of poor people are trying to "treat" underlying unhappiness or stress, sometimes without knowing it (sometimes fully aware). It isn't a lack of understanding about the health risks, it is both an addiction, and the "least bad" alternative for what they're trying to accomplish (improve happiness, treat depression, decrease stress, etc).
It may surprise the smug but there are a lot of very intelligent people who have addictions (e.g. drinking, drugs, eating, smoking, etc), including doctors, PhD holders, and award winning theorists. You're seriously misguided if you think it is because they lack information/health warnings.
I've sat in a dive bar and listened to smokers voices ramble incoherently about the cancer conspiracy. Someone doing that might understand the warnings, but they have rejected them and aren't weighing them against smoking.
Yeah, my intent was to convey the anecdote, not to draw a generalization.
Also, I wasn't saying they lacked awareness of the medical claims about the harms of smoking, I was saying, in my estimation, that they were not weighing that information when they picked up a cigarette (because they were drunkenly rambling about the suppression of cancer cures...).
On some level people start smoking because it's dangerous and bad for your health. They want to signal to others that they have a risk-taking personality, rebel against their parents, etc.
That's true of some people, but not everyone. People also become addicted to exercise, gambling, sex, and lots of other things, but it's not because those things make them look dangerous. It's because those things create a pleasure response in the brain.
Even when smoking wasn't considered dangerous at all, people willingly started doing it. The danger factor is more recent (the last 80 years or so).
> In the United States, and nearly every other country, smoking is more common among the less wealthy and less educated. In the United States, 26.3% of people in poverty smoke compared to 15.2% for the rest of the population. College graduates are almost a third as likely to smoke as those who did not attend college. Because of this difference in smoking prevalence, Americans from the bottom third in household income spend nearly twenty times more on cigarettes as a proportion of their income than those from the top third.
What a strange statistic! It's conflating the difference in cigarette spend and the difference in the incomes of top and bottom thirds to give us a meaningless number.
"Spend" as a noun is my second least favorite corporatist word next to "ask" as a noun. I automatically assume (unfairly) that the speaker is over educated in some useless way and compensates to appear smarter.
Aww, I'm so sorry that your horrible vice that ruins the air for everyone else, makes you look like a billion years old, and inflates my dry-cleaning bill when I'm around you costs you more money. Really, can't express how sorry I am.
Honestly wish the tax on smoking was 200x what it is now. Fucking disgusting habit that needs to be eradicated.
No, they are fine to like what they want. Just not in our shared air. (P.S. For comparison, when I bring stink bomb spray and spray it where I'm at, people get really offended.)
Honestly, I have no problem with smoking as long as no non-consenting person has to be subjected to the second hand smoke. That includes both people doing their daily business in the public in general (designated smoking areas don't count as you have to active walk there, I'm more talking about people smoking in front of entrances to businesses). That also includes people smoking in their homes when they have underage children. But if it only involves consenting people, then do what you want. (I'm even for legalizing many drugs with the same disclaimers.)
Right, similarly you should object any time someone uses a motor vehicle in your presence. God forbid someone drives a truck and you're within 10 feet. You didn't consent to breathe in those fumes, they shouldn't have the right to spread them around anywhere, even in designated driving areas like roads -- they are near sidewalks, after all.
Yes, one is far stronger than the other -- one is not only polluting the air you are breathing in at the moment but also destroying the environment and leading to global catastrophe and the other is an annoyance when you walk down the street and god forbid a poor person is in your way.
I'll give you the point about smoking indoors, I didn't even consider it because at least in the US I haven't seen a place where that's even allowed anymore in the last, 10 years?
Note that we do have limits on what a motor vehicle can output, those limits are being tightened, and the recent company scandal where a certain company lied about those limits should be punished. Smog is a major issue in some cities and should be dealt with and greater emphasis should be put on electric vehicles.
The thing I find fascinating is - I have lived long enough to have seen 50% smoking rates, and nobody complained. I don't know if that was something that was suppressed by social convention, or of the massive anti-smoking media campaigns that came later basically created this dissatisfaction.
But the world was in general a lot funkier back then.
Alcohol is a highly addictive drug that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year.
The reason it's not banned is that we can't control the precursors. Alcohol can be made in almost any conditions from pretty much any food. Even prisons have problems with alcohol manufacture on site.
The banning of marijuana, meth, heroin and cocaine has not exactly been a resounding success. It has opened the door to massive violent crime opportunity, cost the taxpayers billions, and led the greatest incarceration rate of any country in the world. There is no way in which it makes sense; the situation only persists because of the strong puritanical streak that makes it politically popular to pretend doubling down on the war on drugs will somehow make the country better.
No, drug bans have not been outstanding successes, but they've gone very well compared to prohibition of alcohol.
It is at least physically possible to control the distribution of methamphetamine and heroin precursors. The same is not true for alcohol. No alcohol ban could ever work, conceptually.
Believe it or not, I can just buy moonshine off the shelves where I live. I don't (because moonshine), but I could. It's a bit expensive and you can't buy gallon jugs of it, but it's there.
That works for most taxes on consumer products since it's fixed and not based on income.
If two people have the same exact habit it will cost them the same amount. If I have a higher income than you I'm actually paying less relative of my income than I would with a normal tax.
This is true even not considering the social aspect of it. Some of this taxes are on addictive things like drugs (tobacco, alchool) and gambling (lottery). And one social influence of addictive behaviour is poverty.
A sales tax on groceries or a sin tax on cigarettes may be regressive because poor people spend a larger portion of their income on groceries and cigarettes, true.
The lottery, however, is worse. It is actively advertising to these people, encouraging them to have hopes and dreams about a way out of their situation, but instead it just kicks them while they're down. And it's not just some soulless corporate entity doing this, no: it's the same government which purports to care about their plight, not just exploiting them but encouraging them to passively hope for unearned success, instead of pursuing goals as an independent actor or something which might actually improve their lot.
"Hey, you never know!" is a dystopian lie, a few increments worse than "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!"
Buying vs. not buying lottery tickets has very little to do with pursuing vs. not pursuing any particular goals, so I'm not sure why you frame it as a choice between the two.
Buying lottery tickets looks irrational on basis of expected value, but it is a very narrow and somewhat self-contradictory definition of rationality.
It does, but it's important to put the lottery in a historical context. When the lottery started, it was run by criminals, was corrupt and resulted in a lot of violence by competing criminal interests. By creating state-run lotteries, the situation improved dramatically. Now math is really the only way that people are cheated out of their money, you don't have warring organizations trying to control the lottery and at least the government is seeing the proceeds.
The lottery may be a horribly-regressive tax, but it's better than the situation that existed before it was legalized. It's akin to the situation with illegal drugs. If governments started selling them at a slightly-lower price and with higher quality standards, you could still argue that providing drugs to people is making them less healthy. But the situation would be better than what we have today since the states would be making the profit, we'd be rid of the associated crime and many of the overdoses that result from variable quality of street drugs.
You're right that it's expensive to be poor, but I think you misunderstand what "___ taxes the poor" means. It means that there is a disproportionate tax burden on people with less income, otherwise called a regressive tax[1].
Cigarette taxes are powerfully regressive. It's completely true.
But when cigarette taxes go up, youth smoking goes down. Reductions in youth smoking mean permanent, ongoing reductions in overall cigarette consumption, as young people fail to take up the habit.
This is not a controversial assertion. Even priceonomics' cherry-picked sources primarily discuss price inelasticity in adult smokers, who have been addicted for decades.
These taxes are cruel, but necessary. It's a pigouvian tax that literally saves lives.
What to do about this, to make it less cruel and more helpful? As the article says: "To make these taxes more progressive, Farrelly feels that there is “a pretty obvious solution.” He says, “Earmark some of the funds and make sure they are used to support smoking cessation programs that are aimed at low-income smokers.” This is, surprisingly, rarely done."
As I understand it, smoking cessation programs have pretty bad success rates. An old article from JAMA [0] that seems to be one of the canonical papers in the field points out that only 23.6% of people in smoking cessation groups quit successfully. There may have been major advances since then, but I couldn't find new data quickly.
I have heard that a wide variety of addictive behaviors have been successfully treated with psychedelics. Naturally, as most of them are schedule I substances, and thus not widely available for experimentation, sanctioned and reputable research on this matter is rather scarce.
The [flawed] studies already in existence suggest that a single dose of LSD is more effective against alcoholism than an entire year of AA meetings. Anec-data from self-experimenters reporting online suggest that ibogaine interrupts the psychological component of heroin addiction and eases the acute physical withdrawal symptoms for several hours.
Nicotine addiction seems especially tenacious, to the point where you have to pass the 3 year mark of continuous abstinence before anyone can even be 90% confident that you have quit for good. 90% of freshly resolved quitters relapse, most within 3 months.
By those standards, 23.6% is great, but I wonder if that is evaluated at the 3 year mark, or at an earlier time, when the confidence that the person will not relapse is lower.
You want local governments to use the easily obtained revenue generated from cigarette taxes to create programs to reduce smoking? Which reduces revenue from cigarette taxes that they can use to fill in the gaps in their budgets? Good luck with that.
I think Planet Money talked about how you could just give the taxes back to poor people as a tax refund, and it would still have the same positive effect without being a regressive tax.
> These taxes are cruel, but necessary. It's a pigouvian tax that literally saves lives.
And with modern technology it can only get better. For example, why not create an algorithm that scores how healthy your choices at the grocery store are and introduce the appropriate tax in the end?
We are also on the verge of being able to monitor everyone's every movement. Why not tax those who don't exercise enough?
Imagine how much the average lifespan will increase when people finally give up on outdated notions of personal freedom and irrational choices.
It's worth noting that private insurance is already trying this type of thing, tracking driving habits. If the government doesn't do this, health insurers will.
True, the future is looking quite dystopic. I am not a pessimist though: as usual, a new generation will come which will reject all this authoritarianism (as it happened before with sexual behavior, for example).
Not in the United States. Obamacare made most of this type of thing illegal: only geography, age, and tobacco use are allowable variables, and there are caps on the size of the variation in price.
> finally give up on outdated notions of personal freedom and irrational choice
Apparently the cigarette industries' attempts to associate smoking with personal freedom in advertisements have been successful in your case.
I think the health benefits by far outweigh any perceived personal freedom costs. Smoking is damaging but addictive. Too many people want to but don't manage to stop.
If higher prices help reduce smoking, I'm for higher prices.
> Apparently the cigarette industries' attempts to associate smoking with personal freedom in advertisements have been successful in your case.
Not really, I used to smoke but I quit.
That's a straw man, and also quite patronizing. You can hold a rational ethical position without buying into the mythology of Marlboro man. The question still stands: if you accept that health benefits can outweigh personal freedom, where do you draw the line?
> if you accept that health benefits can outweigh personal freedom, where do you draw the line?
When they stop doing so, of course. It depends on how much you value different kinds of personal freedom.
I for example believe that it would be reasonable to tax unhealthy food more than healthy food and have people who are overweight pay more for their health insurance. But I don't think that tracking everyone's movement outweighs potential benefits from taxing lack of physical activity.
Who, and by what metric, determines what "unhealthy food" is? We've all seen plenty of disagreement within nutrition science. Many people take positions that are somewhat more philosophical than scientific. Some foods may only be unhealthy in specific quantities, or in combination with other foods in specific quantities.
Furthermore, there are medical conditions--and even treatments for medical conditions--that can cause obesity that have nothing to do with a person's diet. Should the people suffering from these situations be charged more for their health insurance?
Here's a real-world example:
A friend of mine's wife was, at the time they discovered she was pregnant, diagnosed with leukemia. It has been the most awful thing I've witnessed in some time. A mid-five-foot woman, who probably barely weighed 120 pounds, after months of different treatments, wound up with a host of medical complications, then further treatments. This all wound up causing her to gain what looked like probably 100+ pounds. Last year, they paid over $18K in out-of-pocket medical expenses.
It seems unconscionable to me to advocate my friend and his wife should have to pay more for health insurance because she's now technically obese. They can already barely survive (she cannot work, and he spent 5 months unemployed last year).
Bottom line: very few things are simply black-and-white. There are so many shades of gray. The real world is full of myriad complications and counterexamples that ought to help us realize we can't just draw simplistic lines in the sand based on silly, poorly conceived premises. Oh sure, it sounds good when the idea pops in your head, especially when it doesn't affect you--always because your conception doesn't ever include you. But it's bound, like all things, to come down with undeserved and unbalanced harshness on somebody. And that leads to having to probe whether or not these ideas are just and fair. Oftentimes, they are not.
While there has been plenty of disagreement in nutrition science, there's also a lot of agreement. It's pretty well established that highly processed foods that are loaded with sugar, salt and fat are less healthy than fresh vegetables. When the science changes, laws can also change, and we don't have to have laws that are so specific as to make the "perfect" diet free and any other diet prohibitively expensive.
Examples like your friend that have a hard time controlling their calorie intake due to medical complications are pretty rare. But indeed, as you say, things are not black and white, which is why, in general, laws are fairly complex and it needs lawyers to understand them. It's not like the current tax code doesn't have any special cases for exceptional circumstances. But figuring out all the special cases needed for a tax code that rewards healthy behaviour is probably way out of scope for a HN comment thread.
You draw the line at using taxes selectively, as a means of influencing human behavior.
If you want the public to make healthier choices, do it the right way, with scaremongering and emotional rhetoric. Or rational argument, I guess, if you're some kind of quixotic masochist.~
I think that most people draw the line right at the behaviors that they enjoy, but others consider unhealthy. It's kind of a classic in this country -
"I don't do X because I think it's bad - let's tax/shame/incarcerate anybody who does X, because they're too stupid to realize how bad X is! Think of the children!!!"
and
"I can't believe they're taxing Y! I've been doing Y for years, and it's my business. It's a 'free' country!"
> if you accept that health benefits can outweigh personal freedom, where do you draw the line?
Agreed. I hate using these terms, but the "progressive liberal agenda" that wants to make "HealthCare Free For All" will make your health choices everyone's business.
I'm not paying for your triple bypass surgery, therefor red meat is going to be taxed higher. Etc...etc... Carry it all out to it's logical conclusion and you'll see that soon enough personal freedom won't mean much in a collectivist society and there will be no line to draw.
This is when you line up an army on one side of the field that believes heart disease is exacerbated by the saturated fats, cholesterol, and sodium in red meat, and you line up the army on the other side of the field that believes that heart disease is exacerbated by sugars, simple carbohydrates, and insufficient magnesium, vitamin D, and vitamin K.
Then they converge in the middle, and methodically slaughter any chance at rationally examining the science, with their sharp blades made from laminated dollar bills.
Politics and science do not mix well. Some may not like that other people eat beef steaks. Others may not like enriched white flour or high fructose corn syrup. Some people might not like genetically modified whatevers, or artificial hormone treated this-and-thats. But I don't want my diet to be constrained on all sides by FUD and scaremongering.
Besides that, I don't believe that cigarettes are taxed heavily as a means to benefit the public health. I believe that they are taxed heavily because nicotine addicts will just pay that much for a fix. The supposed health benefit just makes it easier for other people to ignore that a consumer product is being selectively taxed at a scandalously high rate.
> Besides that, I don't believe that cigarettes are taxed heavily as a means to benefit the public health. I believe that they are taxed heavily because nicotine addicts will just pay that much for a fix. The supposed health benefit just makes it easier for other people to ignore that a consumer product is being selectively taxed at a scandalously high rate.
Exactly this. Cigarettes aren't being taxed out of any semblance of altruistic care for public health--that altruistic care is arguably borne out in anti-smoking laws in public places. The taxes, however, are simply a shakedown, like every other type of "sin tax" levied to collect money from people who enjoy a thing that cannot or will not be universally defended as something that is "okay" to enjoy.
I would say the line has always been drawn. Crack is prohibited, for example. Abortion used to be prohibited and is still controversial. Pot is still significantly restricted with the loudest protests against legalization coming from the alcohol industry [1].
It is lobbying by the alcohol and tobacco industry that has kept these respective products as socially acceptable, in spite of the harm caused by smoking, drunk driving, and alcoholism, etc. My view on this matter is pragmatic and impure: society lead by its influencers decides the evil du jour. Sometimes they make good choices and sometimes poor. The world didn't collapse when cigarette taxes started to increase, the tobacco makers didn't die as a result of the lawsuits, and everyone moved on to e-cigarettes.
If you replace "government" with "insurance industry" then everything is still true, except that the insurance industry has one motivator and that's profit, whereas the government's motivator is public health.
The insurance industry wants to not have to pay for your care. The government wants you to not be sick.
Are the limits of what best possible society we can imagine obtaining really so bounded?
There is no inherent reason why anyone's health choices need to be anyone else's business if we were to suddenly awake and find ourselves delighted by the existence of universal public healthcare. We decide as a society what is up for discussion. We can actually agree to respect everyone's personal freedom to make their own choices, and reject allowing John's choice to eat a steak now and again to be any of Mary's business. After all, we're going to do the same when we tell John he has to shut the fuck up about Mary's choice to consult with her physician about an abortion. And, of course, we'll agree that neither John nor Mary gets to say anything about Phil's third visit to rehab this year.
Instead, we steer the national discussion away from finger-pointing, privacy-invading, witch-hunting bullshit, and focus it toward elevating a national ideal of living healthy, responsible, active lives. Sure, there are going to be choices made that don't fit the ideal, but we prize personal freedom. We equally protect everyone. We equally care for everyone. Why? Because there are people who eat red meat who never have triple-bypass surgery; people who smoke who never die of smoking complications; people who drink who never have alcohol-related health issues; people who never eat meat who wind up with some other health issue. We can take care of each other because we want to create and inhabit a great society.
Sure, it may be a pipe dream we never see realized in our own lifetimes. But it ought not be so difficult to imagine alternatives, recognize some valuable principles, and advocate for realizing those principles because they inherently respect and value people as co-citizens in a shared society.
> if you accept that health benefits can outweigh personal freedom, where do you draw the line?
I don't see cigarettes as a personal freedom issue. As long as you find people insensitive enough to smoke in public areas and force those of us that don't smoke to breathe their toxic air, cigarettes should be taxed just like other pollutants are. Taxes are one of the few ways that capitalism has of dealing with externalities.
Eh, not everywhere. For example, in much of the Southeast US, it's still perfectly legal to smoke in certain places. There are increasing restrictions and legislative tweaks, of course. But it's still acceptable to smoke indoors in establishments that decide to only accept patrons > 21 years old, for instance.
Just because the issue is settled legally doesn't change the fact that non-smokers are impacted by smokers. That's why I called smokers insensitive rather than lawbreakers. As an American, there are many things that we're legally allowed to do that I'd still say makes the person doing them an insensitive asshole. The law isn't the only tool we have to control unwanted behavior...social mores can actually be one of the best tools we have since they're less rigid and can change over time.
> As long as you find people insensitive enough to smoke in public areas and force those of us that don't smoke to breathe their toxic air, cigarettes should be taxed just like other pollutants are.
I feel the same way about cars. Your statement fits perfectly:
As long as you find people insensitive enough to drive/idle in public areas and force those of us that don't to breathe their toxic air, cars should be taxed just like other pollutants are.
And that's a slippery slope. What makes you think the line can't actually be drawn. I'm all for personal freedom generally though, but I think adjusting the position of the line to find it's optimal balance is a fine alternative to erasing it altogether.
> If higher prices help reduce smoking, I'm for higher prices.
Higher prices damage the only people that really need any help: those who have already been helplessly addicted for decades. These people are - statistically - poor, under-educated, and unhealthy. Making them pay more than they already have to is just pouring more gasoline over the fire.
Don't fool yourself - you're advocating for the further crippling of these addicts' finances and lives. And in doing so, you're giving even more money to the state, which will just mismanage the money and use it to line its own pockets.
> which will just mismanage the money and use it to line its own pockets.
This is a profoundly American viewpoint. If you assume everyone mismanages funds, you don't give them enough funds to really deliver value on, so they look mismanaged. The rest of the world has relatively well functioning governments despite having quite a bit more responsibility
Let me explain it to you in a simpler way. If you have a house, and your siding is rotting off, you ask everyone in the house to pitch in to fix the siding so the foundation doesn't start to get destroyed. But everyone in the house is a child that holds childish simplistic libertarian ideals and refuses to give you anything more than the bare minimum, so you side it with tarps instead of shingles, eventually the structure starts rotting.
Pitching in implies that it is voluntary. Government funding by taxation is not.
Calling something childish is not an argument.
Being underfunded is no excuse, they could be efficient and get the most out of the money they take (by force, don't forget my friend). If they were, then you can argue we should fund them further.
I'm still eagerly awaiting your definition of well-functioning and an explanation for how the "rest of the world" fall under that definition.
Well, yes, we are talking about _American_ taxes on cigarettes - are we not?
> If you assume everyone mismanages funds, you don't give them enough funds to really deliver value on
Why on Earth would you assume that? I don't give anybody tax money. Considering how much god damned money my country spends murdering innocent civilians in the MENA region, I'd say you're looking at it backwards.
> The rest of the world has relatively well functioning governments
I've passed through nearly four dozen embassies in my day, and never have I met a "well-functioning" government throughout that broad experience. I think you're full of shit, and are just recycling old "isms" that don't apply to the modern world.
> If higher prices help reduce smoking, I'm for higher prices.
This may have worked but the article notes.
> some economists believe that recent hikes have had little impact on consumption. They suggest that the majority of people who were going to stop because of price hikes might have already done so.
From the paper linked under 'some economists'
> Estimates indicate that,
for adults, the association between cigarette taxes and either smoking participation or smoking intensity
is negative, small and not usually statistically significant. Our evidence suggests that increases in cigarette
taxes are associated with small decreases in cigarette consumption and that it will take sizable tax
increases, on the order of 100%, to decrease adult smoking by as much as 5%.
That suggests we may have reached the limit where additional taxes are able to reasonably achieve their goal. If the taxes aren't actually working then I think something else should be done instead of just jacking up the price more and more.
Diet is still, in 2016, poorly understood. Taxing all food choices in a way that successfully reduced negative externalities would be quite a challenge.
For one thing, taxing your grocery cart will not powerfully alter the behavior of people not shopping for the groceries. Tobacco taxes work primarily because we prevent new smokers from taking up the habit, not by alteration of existing smokers consumption patterns.
I do strongly favor substantial increases in alcohol taxes, across the board, for similar reasons to tobacco.
I'm all for higher taxation or, better yet, banning smoking altogether.
The difference between smoking and eating unhealthy/not exercising enough is that smoking affects other people in a very real way through second-hand smoking. So smoking is not just about a single person's freedom of choice because it affects every one around the smoker. It affects those who have decide not to smoke but are now forced to either hold their breath waiting for the bus or breath in the smoke.
I hate to be that guy, but the effects of second-hand smoke studies happened long enough after this all got sufficiently politicized to where I'll (conveniently) take them at face value, but I'll never completely trust them. Simple bias confirmation is sufficient to explain the preponderance of the literature.
The latency times for tobacco effects in general make it a doozy of a thing to study. By the time the information gets to lunkheads like me, it's hash.
I'd argue that alcohol is a completely different beast.
Most people start smoking to be "cool" or because their friends smoke (or both). It's a fact that very few people start to smoke after their eighteenth birthday. If we remove the access to cigarettes and make it uncool to smoke, I firmly believe very few people would start. (I'd be ok with a period of cigarette prescriptions, so all those who smoke now and want to keep doing it could in non-public spaces.)
With alcohol it's different, most people start to drink to get wasted, of course some level of "coolness" is involved and to a large degree friends, but the lure of getting high is there. Alcohol seems to fill an almost universal need for intoxication (and if it's not alcohol it's some other drug).
> The latency times for tobacco effects in general make it a doozy of a thing to study
Sure, but given that the damaging effects of smoking has been proven, I for one would rather play it safe. I want to have my freedom to choose when to expose myself to something that may be damaging to my body and my body alone. I don't want that choice to be done for me by someone else just because they feel like lighting up while we wait for the bus or whatever.
Oh, I think that a full legal prohibition on tobacco would backfire in startling ways. Smoking even now is decidedly unrational; imagine if it was even more illegal.
I get not wanting to be exposed , but the science is still not exactly slam dunk even today, in the same way that even the 1965 Surgeon's General report is. The datasets ( which are admittedly very slow and expensive to cultivate ) aren't of very high diversity.
It didn't work out with alcohol mainly because it is too easy to produce from common food products like fruits or grains - almost everybody can do it at home. Cigarettes are not so easy to produce, so it is completely different matter.
Actually, the article does talk about the higher price sensitivity of younger smokers: namely, they note that the price sensitivity estimates are based on data collected during periods of low cigarette prices, and that at higher price levels, there seems to be no detectable effect on smoking rates, suggesting low price sensitivity.
> But when cigarette taxes go up, youth smoking goes down.
I might have missed that part, but where's the definitively proven causal link between cigarette tax rate and young people declining to pick up the habit?
So, not only smoking is not something that people need to do to survive, but people also have an option to roll their own cigarettes to save money. And yet, these authors decided to use a phrase "cigarettes tax", when "tax" is usually something that you don't have a choice whether to spend money on something or not.
Medications tax the sick that need them. Cigarettes sure as hell don't tax smokers.
Cigarettes, as a product when used as directed will not only harm the individual 100% of the time but will also tax the remaining non smokers. Cigarettes do not cover existential damages such as harm to nonsmokers, litter, garbage and damage to wildlife albeit through fires, avian or sea life.
See Myth 3: The Economics of Tobacco at 'The World Bank' site.
I'm not really surprised by this. Starting to smoke and continuing to smoke are bad life choices and indicate a lack of will power and long-term thinking. Yes, cigarettes are incredibly addictive and quitting is hard (I smoked for 6 years when I was a teen and young adult). The same poor life choices and lack of long-term planning also lead to a low-income existence. Not applying yourself in school because you'd rather "have fun now." Not attending college. Not eating healthy foods. Not exercising. Smoking cigarettes. The fact that these things are all related shouldn't be a mystery or revelation. Poor people smoke more because poor people make bad choices in general.
"Why stop? You are going to die anyway. And don't you deserve to die? You are smoking after all. No point in stopping now. Not like your life was ever going to go anywhere."
Sugar and foods with processes carbohydrates strongly correlates to diabetes in children. So where's the sugar and process foods taxes? It'd save lives.
Really poor people benefit from processed, calorie dense, vitamin-enriched food because it's the cheapest way to get fed. The harmful effects barely affect them because they cant afford to over-eat the stuff. So a processed food tax would be more harmful to the poor than a cigarette tax which, though burdensome, saves a lot of their lives. Food is good except its consumed in excess. Cigarettes are bad, period.
It's not taxing the poor in general that's bad. It's when the tax has a disproportionate impact on the poor compared to the rich. They're regressive and generally considered bad because when designing a tax to pay for say a welfare project that is supposed to benefit the poor taxing them to pay for it is counter intuitive.
I'm split on this tax though since it's a sin tax so on one hand it doesn't really work to tax someone who isn't a smoker but on the other it's not working so why increase the burden on the poor unless it's preventing new smokers?
2. Addiction to a substance and delivery mechanism poisonous to both the user and those around them.
Taxes are among the methods to reduce the prevalence of the latter, as well as to capture negative externalities of their sale. No reason to reduce those.
Addressing poverty and inequality generally, however, would be a Good Thing.
Of course, and almost no-one cares. Smokers in 2016 are like blacks in 1900: they're the pariahs everyone loves to hate. Smoking is banned from buildings; it's not even an option in many places to allow it. Smokers are scorned and looked down upon. Historical dramas whitewash smokers out (or make sure that the villains smoke while the heroes don't); smoking is literally photoshopped out of historical photos.
Would you rather the ads try and sell you detergents and cars?
The most recent ads by the Truth campaign are great. I'm a very sporadic smoker of pipes and cigars, but those commercials about cutting off the source of money for tobacco companies by going after non-cigarette tobacco really got my attention. If I buy another ounce of tobacco this year I'm going to at least put on my hipster hat and procure some tobacco that isn't produced by some massive multinational company with very questionable ethics.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadJust like alcohol, it seems to be people that willingly want to be taxed.
I don't see it as a problem.
They're addicted.
I grew up in the US in the 80s and 90s, where we were bombarded with anti-smoking ads, the health effects were well known, and the prices were high.
It blows my mind that I have peers who smoke. They would have seen the same ads, had the same facts available, and mostly come from similar backgrounds (middle-class).
Plus, smoking a cigarette feels really good. Once you're addicted, they don't, but until then they just feel really nice.
Behaviors are "contagious" that way. Gun violence and suicide have been shown to be "transferrable".
Nicotine is a stimulant that elevates the mood almost like magic.
The numbers are particularly telling if you look at schizophrenia sufferers. People with schizophrenia are about 2.5 time more likely to smoke than people without.
You've answered your own question: rebellion.
That was the main reason I was sneaking cigs in the alley after school.
Just ads, ads and ads. That generates a tobacco culture with smokers and non-smokers, but both just saw ads.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762370.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
Or in comic form:
- http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park
While most of these are far less severe than smoking (perhaps obesity, drinking give it a run for its money), all of them are bad for our health in the long term and we know it, but we do it anyway. There's plenty of information out there to know about it, it's not like people don't know alcohol or burger king is bad for you. So why do people do it?
When you answer that question you'll have the answer to your question.
A lot of especially young people just plain do not care what happens to them when they are 70.
-- Norm Macdonald
Because tobacco smells and tastes nice (cigarettes mostly don't, but cigarettes are to the tobacco world as McDonald's is to the hamburger world). It stems the appetite and heightens the mind.
Why don't more people start to smoke?
Coming from someone who used to smoke 2 packs a day, the addiction wasn't from the cigarettes themselves. It was from the life I had. I was depressed, had a dead end job, a shit relationship, family problems, etc. I tried to quit a number of times, but had many difficulties due to the fact that everything around me was constantly on fire.
I finally quit when things picked up. It was still a challenge going from around 40 cigarettes a day to none (cold turkey), and I ended up saying some things I definitely shouldn't have in the process, but I did it.
It's a similar story for many smokers. Also, if anything, it was blown out of proportion in the 90's. Things seem to have calmed down since then.
That's not addiction, that's just me enjoying a smoke.
The addiction part lasts weeks; the behavior modification part is for the rest of your life.
Life is not a calculus problem...
Tobacco activates the pleasure centres of the brain. Just like food, sex, drinking, or some illegal drugs. So you get a "reward" each time you partake, with smoking being particularly rewarding.
A lot of poor people are trying to "treat" underlying unhappiness or stress, sometimes without knowing it (sometimes fully aware). It isn't a lack of understanding about the health risks, it is both an addiction, and the "least bad" alternative for what they're trying to accomplish (improve happiness, treat depression, decrease stress, etc).
It may surprise the smug but there are a lot of very intelligent people who have addictions (e.g. drinking, drugs, eating, smoking, etc), including doctors, PhD holders, and award winning theorists. You're seriously misguided if you think it is because they lack information/health warnings.
Also, I wasn't saying they lacked awareness of the medical claims about the harms of smoking, I was saying, in my estimation, that they were not weighing that information when they picked up a cigarette (because they were drunkenly rambling about the suppression of cancer cures...).
Even when smoking wasn't considered dangerous at all, people willingly started doing it. The danger factor is more recent (the last 80 years or so).
What a strange statistic! It's conflating the difference in cigarette spend and the difference in the incomes of top and bottom thirds to give us a meaningless number.
Honestly wish the tax on smoking was 200x what it is now. Fucking disgusting habit that needs to be eradicated.
Honestly, I have no problem with smoking as long as no non-consenting person has to be subjected to the second hand smoke. That includes both people doing their daily business in the public in general (designated smoking areas don't count as you have to active walk there, I'm more talking about people smoking in front of entrances to businesses). That also includes people smoking in their homes when they have underage children. But if it only involves consenting people, then do what you want. (I'm even for legalizing many drugs with the same disclaimers.)
I'll give you the point about smoking indoors, I didn't even consider it because at least in the US I haven't seen a place where that's even allowed anymore in the last, 10 years?
Cars are also much more useful than smoking. (Compare what'd happen if cars were banned with what'd happen if smoking was banned.)
But of course you're right, cars are a problem. At least there are emission limits, and electric cars are being worked on.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get rid of smoking. These are separate problems, they can be worked on in parallel.
But the world was in general a lot funkier back then.
In a shared space, balance and respect for other people's tolerances is the way forward.
The reason it's not banned is that we can't control the precursors. Alcohol can be made in almost any conditions from pretty much any food. Even prisons have problems with alcohol manufacture on site.
It is at least physically possible to control the distribution of methamphetamine and heroin precursors. The same is not true for alcohol. No alcohol ban could ever work, conceptually.
The bar is high here and we like it that way.
If two people have the same exact habit it will cost them the same amount. If I have a higher income than you I'm actually paying less relative of my income than I would with a normal tax.
This is true even not considering the social aspect of it. Some of this taxes are on addictive things like drugs (tobacco, alchool) and gambling (lottery). And one social influence of addictive behaviour is poverty.
The lottery, however, is worse. It is actively advertising to these people, encouraging them to have hopes and dreams about a way out of their situation, but instead it just kicks them while they're down. And it's not just some soulless corporate entity doing this, no: it's the same government which purports to care about their plight, not just exploiting them but encouraging them to passively hope for unearned success, instead of pursuing goals as an independent actor or something which might actually improve their lot.
"Hey, you never know!" is a dystopian lie, a few increments worse than "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!"
Buying lottery tickets looks irrational on basis of expected value, but it is a very narrow and somewhat self-contradictory definition of rationality.
The lottery may be a horribly-regressive tax, but it's better than the situation that existed before it was legalized. It's akin to the situation with illegal drugs. If governments started selling them at a slightly-lower price and with higher quality standards, you could still argue that providing drugs to people is making them less healthy. But the situation would be better than what we have today since the states would be making the profit, we'd be rid of the associated crime and many of the overdoses that result from variable quality of street drugs.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regressive_tax
But when cigarette taxes go up, youth smoking goes down. Reductions in youth smoking mean permanent, ongoing reductions in overall cigarette consumption, as young people fail to take up the habit.
This is not a controversial assertion. Even priceonomics' cherry-picked sources primarily discuss price inelasticity in adult smokers, who have been addicted for decades.
These taxes are cruel, but necessary. It's a pigouvian tax that literally saves lives.
[0] http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=381957
The [flawed] studies already in existence suggest that a single dose of LSD is more effective against alcoholism than an entire year of AA meetings. Anec-data from self-experimenters reporting online suggest that ibogaine interrupts the psychological component of heroin addiction and eases the acute physical withdrawal symptoms for several hours.
Nicotine addiction seems especially tenacious, to the point where you have to pass the 3 year mark of continuous abstinence before anyone can even be 90% confident that you have quit for good. 90% of freshly resolved quitters relapse, most within 3 months.
By those standards, 23.6% is great, but I wonder if that is evaluated at the 3 year mark, or at an earlier time, when the confidence that the person will not relapse is lower.
I don't think it was this article, but it's something like this: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/03/15/174358638/a-sur...
I pay taxes to subsidize the training of NHS Doctors and Nurses not flipping Baristas and other Mc Jobs.
And with modern technology it can only get better. For example, why not create an algorithm that scores how healthy your choices at the grocery store are and introduce the appropriate tax in the end?
We are also on the verge of being able to monitor everyone's every movement. Why not tax those who don't exercise enough?
Imagine how much the average lifespan will increase when people finally give up on outdated notions of personal freedom and irrational choices.
Apparently the cigarette industries' attempts to associate smoking with personal freedom in advertisements have been successful in your case.
I think the health benefits by far outweigh any perceived personal freedom costs. Smoking is damaging but addictive. Too many people want to but don't manage to stop.
If higher prices help reduce smoking, I'm for higher prices.
Not really, I used to smoke but I quit.
That's a straw man, and also quite patronizing. You can hold a rational ethical position without buying into the mythology of Marlboro man. The question still stands: if you accept that health benefits can outweigh personal freedom, where do you draw the line?
When they stop doing so, of course. It depends on how much you value different kinds of personal freedom.
I for example believe that it would be reasonable to tax unhealthy food more than healthy food and have people who are overweight pay more for their health insurance. But I don't think that tracking everyone's movement outweighs potential benefits from taxing lack of physical activity.
Furthermore, there are medical conditions--and even treatments for medical conditions--that can cause obesity that have nothing to do with a person's diet. Should the people suffering from these situations be charged more for their health insurance?
Here's a real-world example:
A friend of mine's wife was, at the time they discovered she was pregnant, diagnosed with leukemia. It has been the most awful thing I've witnessed in some time. A mid-five-foot woman, who probably barely weighed 120 pounds, after months of different treatments, wound up with a host of medical complications, then further treatments. This all wound up causing her to gain what looked like probably 100+ pounds. Last year, they paid over $18K in out-of-pocket medical expenses.
It seems unconscionable to me to advocate my friend and his wife should have to pay more for health insurance because she's now technically obese. They can already barely survive (she cannot work, and he spent 5 months unemployed last year).
Bottom line: very few things are simply black-and-white. There are so many shades of gray. The real world is full of myriad complications and counterexamples that ought to help us realize we can't just draw simplistic lines in the sand based on silly, poorly conceived premises. Oh sure, it sounds good when the idea pops in your head, especially when it doesn't affect you--always because your conception doesn't ever include you. But it's bound, like all things, to come down with undeserved and unbalanced harshness on somebody. And that leads to having to probe whether or not these ideas are just and fair. Oftentimes, they are not.
While there has been plenty of disagreement in nutrition science, there's also a lot of agreement. It's pretty well established that highly processed foods that are loaded with sugar, salt and fat are less healthy than fresh vegetables. When the science changes, laws can also change, and we don't have to have laws that are so specific as to make the "perfect" diet free and any other diet prohibitively expensive.
Examples like your friend that have a hard time controlling their calorie intake due to medical complications are pretty rare. But indeed, as you say, things are not black and white, which is why, in general, laws are fairly complex and it needs lawyers to understand them. It's not like the current tax code doesn't have any special cases for exceptional circumstances. But figuring out all the special cases needed for a tax code that rewards healthy behaviour is probably way out of scope for a HN comment thread.
Somewhere around harmful (not just unhealthy) addictive substances.
(Philosophical(?) question: is it personal freedom when you're addicted?)
If addiction is your criterion, just pick one of the things you classify as "just unhealthy", and type "X addiction" into google :)
If you want the public to make healthier choices, do it the right way, with scaremongering and emotional rhetoric. Or rational argument, I guess, if you're some kind of quixotic masochist.~
"I don't do X because I think it's bad - let's tax/shame/incarcerate anybody who does X, because they're too stupid to realize how bad X is! Think of the children!!!"
and
"I can't believe they're taxing Y! I've been doing Y for years, and it's my business. It's a 'free' country!"
Agreed. I hate using these terms, but the "progressive liberal agenda" that wants to make "HealthCare Free For All" will make your health choices everyone's business.
I'm not paying for your triple bypass surgery, therefor red meat is going to be taxed higher. Etc...etc... Carry it all out to it's logical conclusion and you'll see that soon enough personal freedom won't mean much in a collectivist society and there will be no line to draw.
Then they converge in the middle, and methodically slaughter any chance at rationally examining the science, with their sharp blades made from laminated dollar bills.
Politics and science do not mix well. Some may not like that other people eat beef steaks. Others may not like enriched white flour or high fructose corn syrup. Some people might not like genetically modified whatevers, or artificial hormone treated this-and-thats. But I don't want my diet to be constrained on all sides by FUD and scaremongering.
Besides that, I don't believe that cigarettes are taxed heavily as a means to benefit the public health. I believe that they are taxed heavily because nicotine addicts will just pay that much for a fix. The supposed health benefit just makes it easier for other people to ignore that a consumer product is being selectively taxed at a scandalously high rate.
Exactly this. Cigarettes aren't being taxed out of any semblance of altruistic care for public health--that altruistic care is arguably borne out in anti-smoking laws in public places. The taxes, however, are simply a shakedown, like every other type of "sin tax" levied to collect money from people who enjoy a thing that cannot or will not be universally defended as something that is "okay" to enjoy.
It is lobbying by the alcohol and tobacco industry that has kept these respective products as socially acceptable, in spite of the harm caused by smoking, drunk driving, and alcoholism, etc. My view on this matter is pragmatic and impure: society lead by its influencers decides the evil du jour. Sometimes they make good choices and sometimes poor. The world didn't collapse when cigarette taxes started to increase, the tobacco makers didn't die as a result of the lawsuits, and everyone moved on to e-cigarettes.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/01/06/wasserman-schultz-fueled...
The insurance industry wants to not have to pay for your care. The government wants you to not be sick.
There is no inherent reason why anyone's health choices need to be anyone else's business if we were to suddenly awake and find ourselves delighted by the existence of universal public healthcare. We decide as a society what is up for discussion. We can actually agree to respect everyone's personal freedom to make their own choices, and reject allowing John's choice to eat a steak now and again to be any of Mary's business. After all, we're going to do the same when we tell John he has to shut the fuck up about Mary's choice to consult with her physician about an abortion. And, of course, we'll agree that neither John nor Mary gets to say anything about Phil's third visit to rehab this year.
Instead, we steer the national discussion away from finger-pointing, privacy-invading, witch-hunting bullshit, and focus it toward elevating a national ideal of living healthy, responsible, active lives. Sure, there are going to be choices made that don't fit the ideal, but we prize personal freedom. We equally protect everyone. We equally care for everyone. Why? Because there are people who eat red meat who never have triple-bypass surgery; people who smoke who never die of smoking complications; people who drink who never have alcohol-related health issues; people who never eat meat who wind up with some other health issue. We can take care of each other because we want to create and inhabit a great society.
Sure, it may be a pipe dream we never see realized in our own lifetimes. But it ought not be so difficult to imagine alternatives, recognize some valuable principles, and advocate for realizing those principles because they inherently respect and value people as co-citizens in a shared society.
I don't see cigarettes as a personal freedom issue. As long as you find people insensitive enough to smoke in public areas and force those of us that don't smoke to breathe their toxic air, cigarettes should be taxed just like other pollutants are. Taxes are one of the few ways that capitalism has of dealing with externalities.
I feel the same way about cars. Your statement fits perfectly:
As long as you find people insensitive enough to drive/idle in public areas and force those of us that don't to breathe their toxic air, cars should be taxed just like other pollutants are.
And that's a slippery slope. What makes you think the line can't actually be drawn. I'm all for personal freedom generally though, but I think adjusting the position of the line to find it's optimal balance is a fine alternative to erasing it altogether.
Higher prices damage the only people that really need any help: those who have already been helplessly addicted for decades. These people are - statistically - poor, under-educated, and unhealthy. Making them pay more than they already have to is just pouring more gasoline over the fire.
Don't fool yourself - you're advocating for the further crippling of these addicts' finances and lives. And in doing so, you're giving even more money to the state, which will just mismanage the money and use it to line its own pockets.
This is a profoundly American viewpoint. If you assume everyone mismanages funds, you don't give them enough funds to really deliver value on, so they look mismanaged. The rest of the world has relatively well functioning governments despite having quite a bit more responsibility
What?
>The rest of the world has relatively well functioning governments despite having quite a bit more responsibility.
Define well-functioning. By my definition, they are absolutely not.
Calling something childish is not an argument.
Being underfunded is no excuse, they could be efficient and get the most out of the money they take (by force, don't forget my friend). If they were, then you can argue we should fund them further.
I'm still eagerly awaiting your definition of well-functioning and an explanation for how the "rest of the world" fall under that definition.
> If you assume everyone mismanages funds, you don't give them enough funds to really deliver value on
Why on Earth would you assume that? I don't give anybody tax money. Considering how much god damned money my country spends murdering innocent civilians in the MENA region, I'd say you're looking at it backwards.
> The rest of the world has relatively well functioning governments
I've passed through nearly four dozen embassies in my day, and never have I met a "well-functioning" government throughout that broad experience. I think you're full of shit, and are just recycling old "isms" that don't apply to the modern world.
This may have worked but the article notes.
> some economists believe that recent hikes have had little impact on consumption. They suggest that the majority of people who were going to stop because of price hikes might have already done so.
From the paper linked under 'some economists'
> Estimates indicate that, for adults, the association between cigarette taxes and either smoking participation or smoking intensity is negative, small and not usually statistically significant. Our evidence suggests that increases in cigarette taxes are associated with small decreases in cigarette consumption and that it will take sizable tax increases, on the order of 100%, to decrease adult smoking by as much as 5%.
That suggests we may have reached the limit where additional taxes are able to reasonably achieve their goal. If the taxes aren't actually working then I think something else should be done instead of just jacking up the price more and more.
For one thing, taxing your grocery cart will not powerfully alter the behavior of people not shopping for the groceries. Tobacco taxes work primarily because we prevent new smokers from taking up the habit, not by alteration of existing smokers consumption patterns.
I do strongly favor substantial increases in alcohol taxes, across the board, for similar reasons to tobacco.
What do you propose should be taxed?
Taxes are on things you buy.
By the way people who don't exercise will pay taxes on medicines and health care later. So yeah, some way of taxing that already exists.
second-hand smoke also affects people around the smokers
The difference between smoking and eating unhealthy/not exercising enough is that smoking affects other people in a very real way through second-hand smoking. So smoking is not just about a single person's freedom of choice because it affects every one around the smoker. It affects those who have decide not to smoke but are now forced to either hold their breath waiting for the bus or breath in the smoke.
I hate to be that guy, but the effects of second-hand smoke studies happened long enough after this all got sufficiently politicized to where I'll (conveniently) take them at face value, but I'll never completely trust them. Simple bias confirmation is sufficient to explain the preponderance of the literature.
The latency times for tobacco effects in general make it a doozy of a thing to study. By the time the information gets to lunkheads like me, it's hash.
Most people start smoking to be "cool" or because their friends smoke (or both). It's a fact that very few people start to smoke after their eighteenth birthday. If we remove the access to cigarettes and make it uncool to smoke, I firmly believe very few people would start. (I'd be ok with a period of cigarette prescriptions, so all those who smoke now and want to keep doing it could in non-public spaces.)
With alcohol it's different, most people start to drink to get wasted, of course some level of "coolness" is involved and to a large degree friends, but the lure of getting high is there. Alcohol seems to fill an almost universal need for intoxication (and if it's not alcohol it's some other drug).
> The latency times for tobacco effects in general make it a doozy of a thing to study
Sure, but given that the damaging effects of smoking has been proven, I for one would rather play it safe. I want to have my freedom to choose when to expose myself to something that may be damaging to my body and my body alone. I don't want that choice to be done for me by someone else just because they feel like lighting up while we wait for the bus or whatever.
I get not wanting to be exposed , but the science is still not exactly slam dunk even today, in the same way that even the 1965 Surgeon's General report is. The datasets ( which are admittedly very slow and expensive to cultivate ) aren't of very high diversity.
Cruelty is bad.
I might have missed that part, but where's the definitively proven causal link between cigarette tax rate and young people declining to pick up the habit?
Medications tax the sick that need them. Cigarettes sure as hell don't tax smokers.
(And yes, I smoke myself).
It seems to me that taxes are beneficial to poor people, as government spending benefits the poor the most. At least that's the theory.
Or they can directly redistribute the cigarette tax money to the poor.
See Myth 3: The Economics of Tobacco at 'The World Bank' site.
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTHEALTHNUT...
"Why stop? You are going to die anyway. And don't you deserve to die? You are smoking after all. No point in stopping now. Not like your life was ever going to go anywhere."
This is due to an active propaganda campaign.
I'm split on this tax though since it's a sin tax so on one hand it doesn't really work to tax someone who isn't a smoker but on the other it's not working so why increase the burden on the poor unless it's preventing new smokers?
1. Poverty.
2. Addiction to a substance and delivery mechanism poisonous to both the user and those around them.
Taxes are among the methods to reduce the prevalence of the latter, as well as to capture negative externalities of their sale. No reason to reduce those.
Addressing poverty and inequality generally, however, would be a Good Thing.
The most recent ads by the Truth campaign are great. I'm a very sporadic smoker of pipes and cigars, but those commercials about cutting off the source of money for tobacco companies by going after non-cigarette tobacco really got my attention. If I buy another ounce of tobacco this year I'm going to at least put on my hipster hat and procure some tobacco that isn't produced by some massive multinational company with very questionable ethics.