In addition households making less than $13k spend 9% of their income on the lottery. Poor People Spend 9% Of Income On Lottery Tickets – Consumerist
It’s amazing! The price people are paying to kill themselves. I smoked for 40 years and think of all the money I wasted and it probably will still shorten my life. I switched to the e - cig 13 month’s ago and I use the the non nicotine juice because I have high blood pressure. I have used the http://kahunaejuice.com/ but have found the http://exoticseliquid.com is cheaper and has a better variety of flavors.
Unless there are a lot of states with NY-style cigarette taxes, something about this seems off. At $7 a pack, a pack a day will cost you $2,555 a year. That’s 8.5% of $30,000.
For people under the age of say… 45, smoking is one of those things I have ZERO sympathy for. It’s not like smokers haven’t been bombarded their whole lives with how unhealthy and dirty it is, and for the past 20-25 years, they’ve been a distinct minority in society.
Anyone who smokes nowadays who’s under say… 45 is a fucking moron, plain and simple.
There’s too much knowledge out there about just how bad smoking is for smokers, their friends and family and society in general, and too much effort being spent to impart that knowledge to people, for anyone who’s not old to claim anything but selfish stupidity in getting started smoking. I don’t give a shit if their parents smoked, or they thought it was cool, etc… it took a deliberately stupid decision to take that puff and keep going, and I don’t have any sympathy for that.
Not because they’re addicts, but because it’s willfully stupid and harmful to more than just themselves, and that steams me.
Your assumptions may be a bit low.
According to this list, dated August 1, 2014, 18 state have cigarette prices exceeding $7 per pack. The cost is $8 or more in 14 states, $9 or more in 8 states and over $10 per pack in 2 states - Illinios and NY.
It’s tough to find a reputable site for the average number of cigs smoked per smoker per day (most give the per capita number), but I went with this NIH site, which shows that roughly 30% of smokers report smoking 20-25 cigs per day, while another 25% reported smoking 26-40 per day. I’ll use 30 per day (1.5 packs) as the overall average since that is the rough median for a little over 1/2 of all smokers. That translates to 548 packs per year.
Annual cost estimates:
Low end - $5.25548 = $2874 (9.5% of $30,000)
Middle - $6.35548 = $3477 (11.5% of $30,000)
High end - $12.85*548 = $7035 (23.4% of $30,000)
Those results are much closer to what was reported in the article.
Well fuck me. Some people smoke a lot. As a smoker, I know lots and lots of other smokers but only a couple who smoke more than one pack on a normal day (personally, for example, I might smoke a full pack or more if I “go out” for the night or go to a football game or something, but on a normal day I smoke 15 or fewer.)
Another thing jacks up the price for poor smokers: they aren’t buying a carton at a time. they’re buying a pack at a time, and often from a convenience store or vending machine (do they still exist?)
Something else making the bite worse is take-home pay. When you say someone makes $30,000 a year, that’s almost always gross pay, but net take-home is typically somewhere around two-thirds of that, so they’re really coming home with $20,000 a year.
Comments like this really don’t have anything to do with the subject and only provide risk of derailment. Let’s try not to make them anymore unless it’s a thread actually about politics.
Perhaps unfortunately, this just isn’t true. When you look at all public health measures, tobacco taxes are by far the most cost-effective way to save lives. They really do work.
That’s right, although when I smoked it was closer to 10 packs a week. But the median income of all the people whose income is $30,000 or less might be $15,000 or $20,000. And $3000 is 15% of $20,000 and 20% of $15,000.
I didn’t think of that.
In fairness, that seems to be a response to this, which I read as a read as a reference to the voter ID debate:
There was a article in the Natl Geo. It’s gonna be made into a film. In it, the woman is traveling across Australia on a camel with her dog.
Possible spoiler:
The dog dies, having eaten poisoned food left for wild dingoes. She states she didnt have enough room to carry dog food. But she did have plenty of room to carry her ciggies. Thus her smoking habit killed her dog.
Inconsiderate careless bitch.
<continuing hijack> More inconsiderate than the people deliberately poisoning the local wildlife? </ch>
Years ago I would do family vacations driving from Pittsburgh to Hilton Head. There was a big tobacco business we would stop at on the way home that had amazingly cheap prices for cigs. I didn’t smoke, but many of my friends did, so we would stop and fill a cart with cartons.
In retrospect, it was probably illegal.
My understanding is that high cigarette taxes are most effective stopping people from ever picking up the habit: the demand for cigarettes is highly inelastic for addicts and highly elastic for non-addicts.
“American smokers” does include a few people who smoke a pack or more a day, but I suspect a majority of them smoke way fewer than that. Even a pack a day smoker isn’t much over $1,500 a year, which is only 5% of a $30K gross. I haven’t seen anything yet on Vice that wasn’t exaggerated and cherry-picked to the point of essential bullshit.
Most people who pull up at Starbucks pay more for their habit than a pack of cigarettes.
Now this is complete bullshit made up by someone who clearly does not know the actual prices of Starbucks drinks, nor the prices of a pack of cigarettes.
From just a few posts up:
You really think most people in Starbucks spend more than $7? Or more than $10? Every day?
Not to blame the victim here, but poor people don’t have good financial skills. They didn’t learn to manage their finances in school or from their equally poor parents or social circle, and when you’re poor there is little opportunity to learn.
If you smoke for any length of time, you know it’s bad for you. I knew it at age 18 when I would wake up wheezing with painful lungs. King James railed against the dangers of tobacco smoke in the early 1600s. We knew it caused cancer in the 50s. Anybody who is still alive knew their whole lives smoking was deadly. Age is no excuse. You know what is an excuse? Addiction.
$10 is for name brand cigarettes like Marlboro. Pall Malls or some generic can be quite a bit cheaper, and that’s what poor people in Chicago are buying. In Missouri you can still get packs for less than $3, so absolutely, quite a few Starbucks habits are pricier than quite a few cigarette habits. Agreed though, it is much more likely to go the other way. Also, when you can’t afford a skinny vanilla half-caff caramel macchiato latte, a 6 cent cup of Folgers from your Mr. Coffee at home will do the trick. The only cheap alternatives to cigarettes is rolling your own. And it is far more expensive than 6 cents, and a lot more effort than Mr. Coffee.