New taxes have bumped the price of cigarettes in NYC to all time high levels. Is around $ 15.00 a pack enough to break people of the cigarette habit?
If they’re that high there is huge profit for bootlegging, I would assume that will be the next entrepreneurial gold-mine.
Organized bootlegging aside. what would one save by going to any nearby suburb in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut? All of them are just a commuter train ride away.
I personally hope everyone who currently smokes quits, forcing New York to come up with a new revenue stream I also personally hope whatever they come up with next hits those people who whine endlessly about cigarette smoke without realizing the public services they feel entitled to are funded by a tobacco tax. And no, I don’t smoke…quit many, many moons ago.
Hard to say. Usually when people are addicted, they just keep paying. Never stopped my parents from smoking, just meant that there was less money to go around for other things like food, clothing, hobbies, etc. It’s not just the smoker that’s affected, it’s everyone that depends on the smoker for support. Then again, it never hit $15 a pack here.
I’d definitely have to quit if the price got that high. I’d be paying more for smokes than I do for my mortgage. If you smoke a pack a day, that’d be almost $500 a month. The hardcore NY smokers will just buy them elsewhere.
A friend bought by mail for awhile, when they went to $6 a pack here, but she got caught and had to pay a fine, or something – she said it was a few hundred dollars. Now she has a truck driver friend buy them for her, in Illinois.
The latest tax increase in Washington (state) pushed most cigs over $7/pack. That was enough for me.
Or more weekend trips to Indian reservations.
It will simply drive people (literally) to areas where the cigarettes are cheaper thus lowering the tax revenue.
Wait, how much tax are they putting on these things? You can get a carton of Marlboros for less than $60 here ($54, maybe? I’m not a smoker, I just got bored while waiting for people to ring up a couple of weeks ago and noticed the price), so that’s less than $6 a pack, and this recent thread says that single packs are in the $6 neighborhood too. So is this $8-9 more just in taxes in NY, or are they more expensive but also being soaked for taxes?
I don’t know about NY, but here in MA a pack of name brand cigarettes (Marlboro, etc.), runs around $8 plus change. People either 1) know somebody who goes up to NH and gives them the money for a carton (cartons runs about $80 here); 2) switch to a no-name cheaper brand; or 3) suck it up, literally and figuratively.
And no, I don’t know of anyone who’s quit because of the taxes.
Are these taxes on just cigarettes, or all tobacco products?
If just the cigarettes, me personally? I’d switch to Cigars or pipes.
Normally the tax increases hit all tobacco but the other products might not have such a high rate.
No, because they aren’t rational about it. Thus the term “addicted”. As others have said, they’ll either go black market or just buy elsewhere.
Mmm, I disagree to a certain extent. I think that this will prompt a small minority to quit. I can’t say how many off the top of my head, but people do quit when prices rise. Addiction does not beat out rationality all of the time.
If people do quit, and cigarette taxes disappear as a source of revenue, that will probably be a long-term gain for the state, as I’m guessing that the amount of money the state pays for treatment of cigarette-related ailments outweighs the taxes cigarettes bring in.
Of course I am making all of this up, but if New York State has intelligent policymakers (true, past performance does not indicate this at all), they will have considered all of these issues.
If it’s just a gamble to make some short term cash because they have no money and are desperate, eh, all bets are off.
Wow. I quit smoking 31 years ago. I remember paying around $10 for a carton.
The latest tax increase in my state was specifically “per pack”, I believe. Chewing tobacco is considerably cheaper.
Heh. I started almost 30 years ago (1981), and remember the price as 90 cents/pack at the time.
I’m a Yankees fanatic and I watch almost every game they play when I can schedule my work around it. I watch on the YES network mostly or any New York station that is feeding it so I get the commentators for “my” side.
Now, I say that because I also get to see the local commercials. I will say that I’ve never seen so many quit smoking commercials anywhere else. As an aside, these commercials are usually pretty in-your-face and I’m often amazed at what they’ll show. One that made a friend sick was them showing someone squeezing the oozing plaque from a smoker’s artery. Hardcore!
Anyway, it seems that the state of New York is pretty serious about helping people quit. They offer free gum, patches, and medication to people who’ll call the quit line. I don’t know all of the stipulations as I’ve never called and am not a smoker or a New Yorker, but it seems to me that they want people to quit.
Smokers will join the military en masse and request overseas duty stations, where smokes are tax exempt. I don’t know how much they are now, but a carton of Marlboros in Germany at the PX in 1991 was $6.50.
The state tax on a pack of cigarettes is $4.35 in New York. New York CITY also has an additional tax of $1.50. So that’s $5.85 tax. On a $15.00 pack of cigarettes is 39%.
But if you look at the article, you can see even in NYC the price varies from $12.50 upward. And it’s a bit less if you leave the City of New York or go to NJ or CT.
According to Bloomberg the average price for a pack of cigarettes in NY State is $8.92.