Ravenwood - 09/19/03 01:49 PM
"4 States Rated Highly in Fighting Smoking" -- Headline, NY Times, September 18, 2003.
Aren't cigarettes legal products? If so, why are taxpayer dollars being spent on "fighting" smoking? The smoking "fight" is nothing more than a governmental attempt to control human behavior, and there is no reason to spend taxpayer dollars to coerce people to give up the habit. Since smokers already pay sin taxes on cigarettes, higher life insurance rates, and higher medical insurance rates, the issue of health care costs is moot. Not to mention smokers die quicker and will ultimately use less social security and retirement benefits.
If they think smoking is so bad, they should just outlaw it. Then we could go back to the prohibition days of mob violence and bootlegging that the nanny temperance movement brought us in the Roaring 20s. Plus there is a lot of money to be made on the black market once cigarettes are illegal. Those $5 packs and $10 cigars will be worth 5 times that once prohibition is brought back.
On the flipside, if these states are "successful" at severely reducing legal consumption of tobacco, then they'll take a serious hit to the bottom line, as the "sin taxes" on cigarettes are quite high, and that money gets greedily spent like all other tax revenue.
They've tried increasing taxes in order to reduce consumption (which, they hope, won't result in a decrease in income) but when taxes get too high, the black market moves in - as it always does. Supply and demand, baby. The free-market economy responds.
Catch-22. Eliminate consumption, eliminate tax revenue. And when was the last time you saw a politician in favor of reducing revenue?
Posted by: Kevin Baker at September 19, 2003 5:40 PMThere are present day examples to confirm what you are suggesting. When the prison I worked at went non-smoking the price of ONE smuggled cigarette went to $5.00. When inmates got too much in debt to the convicts that ran the black market smuggling operation violence increased.
Posted by: tom scott at September 20, 2003 3:55 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
