Well, it’s your fault for posting on a MB devoted to promoting particular political points of view. Maybe you should look for one that is more focused on something like, say, fighting ignorance.
It’s easier to fight ignorance if you hang around in the places where there’s so much of it.
Sam, I wasn’t intending my argument to be used to justify social engineering. My point was the same as yours, that the OP’s question, on its face, was a silly one. Of course smoking is a net drain on society, economically.
So what?
mswas, I don’t remember the last time I had a popsicle, but I had a cigarette on my drive home Sunday evening.
There’s no question that in any given year a smoker costs more in health care coverage than a non-smoker. It may even be true that over a lifetime a typical smoker will consume more health-care resources than a non-smoker, but it may not be, and insurance numbers wouldn’t necessarily tell if that were so because non-smokers would incur a proportionally higher percentage of their health care costs while covered by someone other than the private insurance company (medicare).
But most importantly, a private insurer doesn’t get the benefits from smoking that the government gets (not having to pay a pension to you if you’re dead, and not having to cover your health expenses under medicare).
So I don’t think insurance rates by themselves are a good proxy for the overall cost of smoking to taxpayers. They could certain help in determinng things like the annual increase in health care costs.
If you look at health care costs alone, the 1994 study by the Government of Canada showed that smokers added 2.5 billion dollars a year to the costs of health care - while paying 7.8 billion dollars in tobacco taxes, for a net gain in government revenue of 5.3 billion dollars. That’s money taken mostly from poor people.
I still fail to understand why ‘progressives’ seem so enamored of cigarette taxes. It seems completely contrary to what they claim to believe in.
Well, that’s actually a difficult question. You know what else is a net drain on society, economically? Retirement. Economically, we’d all be better off if we put a bullet into everyone when they turn 65 or otherwise stop being productive.
But there are two different types of ‘costs’. One is an opportunity cost, such as lost ‘potential income’, which I utterly reject as being anyone’s business. Because if it is, then the door is open to all kinds of social engineering - pushing people into the ‘right’ kinds of jobs, limiting leisure time, forcing people to work even if they have the personal resources to quit, etc. This is the road to Fascism or Communism - take your pick.
The other is an ‘externality’. If my smoking ruins the siding on your house and you’re forced to replace it, I’ve directly imposed a cost onto you that you didn’t agree to, and I should have to pay.
The problem I’ve been discovering is that all the studies that purport to show these external costs to society of smokers always seem to throw in lost income as if it belonged there. Why? Because otherwise, they would show that smokers are already overtaxed. And since most of these studies are produced either by anti-smoking organizations, or by health agencies who have a vested interest in stopping people from ‘harmful’ activities, or by government agencies with a vested interest in coming up with rationales for more taxes, they all seem to skew in the same direction.
In every study I’ve found so far, if you remove ‘lost income’ as a cost to society, it turns out that smokers are no net burden at all, and that the taxes they currently pay more than offset the increased burden they put on the health care system.
There’s another philosophical argument, which I haven’t even applied here - even if smoking causes an externality because of public health care, why should smokers have to pay it if they didn’t have any choice in accepting that public health care? In the U.S., smokers pay their way through increased health care premiums. This is fair. In Canada, the government picks up the tab, and therefore smoking becomes a matter of public interest. To me, this is an argument against public health care, not against smoking. But that’s a wholly different debate.
You’ve never heard arguments against smoking that are based on nothing more than smoking being bad for you? Seriously? You’ve never seen anti-smoking activists use tactics like putting ads on TV showing a child sitting on the grave of a parent who died of lung cancer? You’ve never heard people argue that tobacco companies are evil because they are killing people? That they should be regulated or shut down because their product is intrinsically bad? If not, you must live on a different planet than I do.
And if you don’t think such arguments are used to lay the groundwork for anti-smoking legislation, I want some of what you’re smoking (assuming it isn’t tobacco - I hate cigarettes).
Thanks for the rolleyes, but private business is private. The ‘public at large’ would be their customers, who can choose to buy elsewhere if the company’s products are too expensive. This is not an externality. If a company hires a smoker, and the smoker is absent a lot and therefore productivity drops and the company becomes less competitive, then there will be a bias against hiring smokers - which is fine. That’s the market in action. But it’s not the business of the government to protect the productivity of private corporations.
Wow! So, if you decide to take six weeks off, you’re robbing society! If you take early retirement, you’re robbing society! You bastard!
The notion that choosing to make less money, and therefore pay less tax, is somehow ‘robbing’ society is repugnant. It’s starting with the assumption that society is the true owner of your productive capacity, and any amount of it that you try to claw back for your own purposes is somehow ‘theft’.
Do you really believe that? If not, why do you think that choosing to smoke, and therefore to potentially die early, is any different than choosing to follow your dreams and make a living as, say, an artist, when you could have made four times more as an employee of a corporation? Or is the artist also ‘robbing society’? After all, think how much more tax money we would have gotten had he been an accountant instead!
Oh, and by the way, this study found no correlation between smoking and workplace absence in the first place.
Well, on my planet “bad for you” means heart disease, emphysema and several different forms of cancer for starters, not “sinful”. The sin angle to smoking went out with the flapper era.
I’m trying hard, but I can’t think of any laws mandating hiring/firing practices on the basis of smoking.
So being a smoker defines some good to society equating to being an artist? That’s a good one.
To make some modicum of sense, this should be phrased as a choice between an artist who smokes and one who doesn’t. But then we’d slide into a discussion of whether, given what constitutes art these days, the premature death of certain artists might be good for society. Best not to go there. 
I accept the argument that there are different kinds of costs, but it seems to me that if legislation based on externalities is valid, you run into the same kinds of problems that you do considering opportunity costs.
If we consider the health care system to be an external cost, then what’s to stop social engineering that minimizes use of that system? Any activity that involves undue risk is suspect. Mandated exercise programs and diets could be justified. I just don’t see how analyzing one type of cost is any better than considering both, if the point of the analysis is to support a policy of limiting that activity.
The difference between a smoker’s smoke damaging your house and damaging his house is that he has to pay to fix whatever damage he causes to his own house, or live with the consequences. If we introduce a societal obligation by which siding contractors are obligated to replace the siding of any house, whether or not the owner can afford it, and the siding replacement is so expensive that the costs are shared among all homeowners by insurance and government authority, it stops mattering whose house is damaged.
Why not discuss the burden on society that the orphaned children of deceased smokers causes? I’m not sure it’s significant, but I can’t think of a reason to exclude stuff like this.
Also, lost income taxes should definitely be in the calculation. The state gets less income tax directly because of premature death caused by smoking. There’s nothing draconian or freedom-suppressing about considering the statistical impact of that phenomenon, but there would be if we were discussing using it as an argument to ban tobacco.
Perhaps I’m being dense, but I don’t understand the analogy you’re attempting to set up. Can you clarify?
Isn’t (part of) the point, though, that if lost income taxes are included in “the calculation” (as a cost), so should the “benefits” of premature death (such as uncollected social security, unneeded health care expenses, etc.)?
I think that the idea that smoking is a net drain on society is fallacious. Our system is based largely on consuming things that we don’t need. Whether that’s going to the movies, eating ice cream, or taking a drive through the mountains, we could consider a vast sum of our behavior as things that are unecessary. The problem with that is that our distribution systems are facillitated by our behavior. People in small mountain towns are able to participate in the economy because we buy cigarettes from them when we are on our leisure drives.
Good exposition.
A valuable point. People rarely consider the small mountain town-leisure drive-tobacco connection.
So true, and we especially need to consider the small entrepreneurs. Where would the portable oxygen tank industry be without smokers?
Your emotional hyperbole is missing the point. The point is the economy is driven by many unhealthy behaviors, from eating fast food to driving unecessarily. The individual health risks are in and of themselves a valid argument. The drain on society’s economic resources argument is not. It is not made valid by the fact that you can point to individual horror stories. Consumerism is driven largely by vice. Commercials for new food products are often predicated on two things: 1) generous portion and 2) addictiveness. Our product is so addictive you’ll need as much as you can get, but luckily for you, the portion is generous so you’ll be satisfied until you have to run back out and get more. How many commercials for fast food that clogs your arteries do you see where someone is eating a giant burrito/pizza pocket/burger etc… and they are unwilling to share it with their friends while they have a look of slavish devotion complete with crazed eyes and rictus grin while they consume the magical fabulousness of Yum Co?
Unhealthy behaviors drive the economy. They are not a net drain. Marijuana is one of the largest cash crops in the nation, people put food on their tables by growing and selling it. Teenagers have pocket cash from slinging Big Macs.
It’s easy to make fun of someone’s point by decontextualizing it through focusing too narrowly on one of their examples, but try and look at little bit deeper at the point being made.
No one is saying emphezema is a good thing, but neither are greenhouse emissions, neither is obesity, neither are heart attacks or colon cancer. The entire economy of Vegas was built on vice and its economy has continued to grow into an American institution.
I detect a subtle connection between the points you are making in paragraphs #1 and #2… 
Very few people die of smoking-related diseases while they are young enough to have small children. I think you just came up with a strawman. But if we’re going to include it, please tell me the logical reason why you wouldn’t also tax say, skiing, because a skiier can break his neck and leave his kids orphaned? Especially since skiiers are far more likely to be young enough to have small children.
For that matter, do you have any idea how expensive it is to repair a massive leg fracture and rehabilitate someone?
Please explain to me, in logically consistent terms, how you can justify tallying up every ‘cost’ of smoking, and using that as a rationale to tax people for the behaviour, when you’re not willing to do the same thing for motorcycle riding, or skiing, or eating potato chips, or any number of other habits that can cost the health care system money?
Please be specific. No platitudes. Make a logical argument.
I fully agree! Let’s tax behaviours that lower your possible income. In that spirit, I notice that you’ve posted 467 messages on the Straight Dope. That’s time you could have spent in a second job, contributing much-needed income tax to the economy. If we assume 10 minutes per message, that’s 77 hours of productive time you’ve wasted on this message board. Assuming you make $15/hr, and you’re in the 28% tax bracket, I figure your Straight Dope tax should be about $323. Please cut a cheque to the government, and explain that you feel you need to pay it to stay morally consistent. And note that I’m letting you off easy, because I’m sure you spend far more time reading than posting.
Tell me why it would be unfair to force you to work as much as humanely possible or face tax consequences, while it’s fair to tax smokers because their choice may cause them to make less income than they otherwise could?
I also note that you are posting during the day, which likely means you’re using your employer’s time, or you’re unemployed. Either way, you are costing the nation productivity. You should be taxed accordingly. Or maybe you’re in school, which means public tax dollars are supporting you, and you aren’t studying to your full ability. Either way, your choices cost everyone else money. Pay up.
We have a man in his mid 30s in the hospital now with a new diagnosis of small cell carcinoma. Lung mass, brain metastases, skin metastases. Very bad prognosis. Heavy smoking history (started in his early teens).
Anecdotal, yes. Typical, no.
But damn.
Cigarettes cause fire damage.
Saying that cigarette smokers die early and don’t contribute to Social Service is similar to an anti-abortion argument: All those aborted people are not paying into the SS system 