The state of NY says it will start to collect tax on sales of cigarettes, sold on reservations to non residents starting Sept 1st. The Indian Nations naturally oppose this and will do so in court, so they say
The taxes smokers pay go in part to fund smoking cessation programs like the above. That’s a good thing, no arguments there.
What I dislike is that cigarette taxes are the go to budget fixer-upper whenever the state needs funds. There are many other things the legislature could do to fix the budget but won’t because of the political fall out…fixing our incredibly bloated bureaucracy would be a start, for one. But no, they go the easy route and tax tobacco with the excuse that the tax increase is needed to pay for the health-related costs incurred by smokers all the while completely disregarding the fact that the tobacco settlement money and taxes previously paid by smokers were supposed to be taking care of health related costs.
I also dislike the fact that one particular group is singled out for ostensibly costing the state money but other groups aren’t. If you’re going to go that route, you should also tax junk food but nobody seems to want to deal with fat people waddling all over Albany in protest.
I am a smoker and think that it is getting ridiculous to simply beat up on smokers and ignore all the other vices that are bad for you.
Let’s tax all alcohol 40% - certainly no good comes from drinking beer or wine.
Let’s tax all french fries 40% - bad for weight and heart and cholesterol.
Raise taxes on sugar and salt to 200% as neither is good for you!
Raise taxes on gas to 400% - bad for the environment and people should just stop driving so much and relying on foreign oil.
Raise taxes on porn 500% - only degenerates look at it anyway.
Start taxing all churches 500% - I find organized religion personally offensive and - hey, isn’t that the game we are playing here - raise taxes on ANYTHING you personally don’t like or use - and screw the rest of the world.
Non smoker here, and while I generally agree with you, dosent Nevada have some of the lowest prices (and I suppose corresponding tax rates) on cigarettes and alcohol in the nation?
It seems to me that booze in Nevada is generally as cheap as any place in all of the USA, and certainly more readily available than 99% of other places in all the Western World…
I’d actually be for this. Porn, and its ancillary services, is insanely profitable and widely consumed, and people who use it are not likely to stop no matter how expensive it becomes.
I say raise the taxes on smokes, booze, and porn. Legalize pot and tax the hell out of that too. The national Deficit would be paid off before we know it.
It makes sense, would work, and the Republicans would cry, so of course it won’t happen.
While I suppose compared to NYC, we’re cheap, but the tobacco taxes went up here big time as well. I roll my own (Drum) and a can of it used to cost about $4 - $6 depending on where you bought it. Now that same can is $30. Luckily the can lasts me a long time, but still - a price hike that strikes me as more mean-spirited and vengeful than fair.
Regarding booze - I think the prices here (at least in the supermarkets) are about the same as when I lived in California. The only difference here is that casinos give it away freely (for tips to hostesses) with the “secret” plan that drunks play more, and play stupidly. This is why I never drink in a casino, unless just going out with friends for that purpose and chat at a bar - but not when we go play video poker or whatever. Those “free” drinks don’t help much when thinking strategy.
I’ll gladly pay 6 times what I currently pay for porn 
You might run into a first amendment issue if you started a porn tax. You’d be taxing the same media at different rates based on the content.
Interesting graphic showing how much cigarettes are taxed in the individual states.
New York is highest, and it should come as no surprise that South Carolina is lowest.
Most of those aren’t really comparable.
There is evidence that drinking moderate amounts of alcohol is harmless or beneficial.
Same for french fries, sugar and salt. In fact, eating no salt would kill you. Nobody dies from not smoking.
Porn is pleasurable and generally harmless to beneficial; the people who do the damage are the sort who try to ban it. Not to mention that this is the age of the Internet; raising taxes on porn like that would just kill the pay sites since 500% of “free” is nothing. And of course, it’s free speech.
And all of the above differ from smoking in that they don’t get into the air and hurt innocent people like smoke does.
As for a hefty tax on gasoline, that doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all. It would encourage fuel efficiency, and given that it is consumed in such large amounts I don’t see it as very easy to smuggle and black-market.
As for religion, while I think that religious organizations should be taxed like anything else persecuting them like that would have the opposite of the intended effect. Religions thrive on low level persecution like that. They would just become more fanatic and violent.
If you are drinking “moderately”, then the tax wouldn’t bother you, would it?
Again, moderate amounts of salt -even with the tax - would be no big deal, right?
Yes, but taxing any film productions of porn a huge amount would make distribution more costly…granted, I used this as a wild-ass (so to speak) example of people taxing what they don’t use/like.
Fine. Then let’s tax all bullets 1000%, as I believe when they go in the air, they hurt more people than smoke…can’t wait until the NRA hears that proposal!
Plus, this is not “banning smoking from bars” - you folks got that already - this is taxing people who smoke at home, or in their backyard - simply because you don’t like smokers. BTW, still pisses me off that the vast majority of those who voted to ban smoking - in bars - never go to a damn bar anyway.
Easy to say if you have a half-way decent public transportation system - for instance, in NYC who needs a damned car?! But if you don’t live where there is a good public transportation system, you are screwed if the taxes go up - but then again, that is kind of my point - if it doesn’t affect you, then who cares?
Oh, but the joy of seeing Scientology and the Catholic Church paying huge taxes would almost make paying the tobacco taxes worthwhile!
Eh, it would just move the porn industry overseas, to porn tax havens such as France and Canada. All it would do is put American porn industry workers out of work, creating even more competition for jobs in these hard economic times. Thus, taxing porn is UNPATRIOTIC!
Chris Rock suggested doing something similar to reduce gun violence. Make every bullet cost $5,000. It makes a certain amount of sense.
Depends on how high the tax is. Taxes on salt especially would have to be so large that it would still be burdensome with necessary levels of salt, since it’s not like even salty food is covered in crusts of the stuff.
You assume that the people producing it will even be findable, much less taxable. And that video is the only form of porn; there’s drawn and written porn too of course.
And besides, the anti-porn crusade is controlling and thuggish on an entirely different level. When people are being tossed into prison because someone on the other side of the country saw them smoke, or cops break into smokers’ houses and trash the place then we can compare them.
Sure, fine with me. I’d repeal the Second Amendment entirely and melt down the majority of personal weapons if I could. Making them expensive to use sounds like a perfectly good idea.
As for how the NRA would react? Pretty much how they always act. They don’t have a mode calmer than “froth at the mouth” as far as I can tell.
And how do you know that? And to the extent that’s true, hasn’t it occurred to you that the reason they were avoiding going to bars was the smoke?
Me?
The logical thing to do would be to use the revenue to help fund better public transportation in that area.
It’s higher than that. Don’t forget the federal tax of $1.01 per pack. So there’s $6.86 of cigarette tax (federal, state and local) included in the posted price. In addition, most states apply the sales tax on top of the posted price (I’m assuming NY is one of them). The combined state and local sales tax rate in NYC is 8.875%. Assuming the $15 mentioned in the article is the posted price, there is an extra $1.33 sales tax. So there’s $8.19 tax in every $16.33 you pay, for a tax rate of 50.1%.
Just the opposite - cigarettes lower health care costs overall, because smokers die young and therefore do not incur the higher health care costs of old age. The figure I remember is that the state saves $0.32 per pack in health care spending.
Regards,
Shodan
Do you have a cite? I know there was a study that showed precisely what you’re saying, because my Ethics professor used it as an example of how not to fund ethical studies. But I believe it was problematic for methodological reasons as well, IIRC.
And then we can tax the use of the public transit! Der Trihs, I don’t say this enough, but you’re a GENIUS!
Actually, taxing things that are built for public use is a perfectly reasonable thing to do (as long as the tax itself is reasonable, of course), I just couldn’t help but lunge at this one.
no, it’s not reasonable, presuming the point of taxing gasoline is go get people to use public transportation. You seem to be falling into the right wing fantasy that the government taxes out of the sheer joy of taxation.
I was in New York two weeks ago and brought my own cigarettes from home, knowing they’d be expensive. I did have to bite the bullet and buy a pack while there, and it hurt me to spend $11. I might be able to do $15 if I only occasionally smoked, like socially or only when I was stressed. But for a “real” smoker, I’d imagine they’d just go to New Jersey.