I hope you don’t drive. If you do, you’re affecting others with your pollution. So, I propose we tax you until you can no longer afford to drive. After all, “your habit is unsavoury. You can pursue it if you wish, but we will exact a price for your anti-socialness. I have no sympathy.”
[sub]Note to UK Dopers who support a cigarette tax: you are allowed to reply to that statement with “but we are taxed to death on petrol” ONLY if you think this is a good thing and think the tax should be raised even more until people are forced to stop driving. Otherwise, you are holding double standards.[/sub]
I can have strong anti-smoking attitudes at times…but even I find that attitude over the top… “we will exact a price for your anti-socialness”?.. :eek:
That’s a long ways away from …we will tax this product to help pay for the associated medical burdens on society…or we will tax this product to help discourage teen smoking (the earlier poster was wrong…teens are price sensitive when it comes to smoking).
Don’t worry, beagledave, the wealthy can still smoke, and pollute, and do whatever they want. As usual, we drive the poor people into economic submission. No one is saying they can’t smoke, right? So everything is fair.
Health care for everyone! Now that we’ve made you take it, now we’ll make you pay for it. So what happens when people stop smoking and this revenue dries up? A 100% tax on ski lift tickets? Motorcycle helmets? What behavior can we discourage next (but don’t make it illegal, never make it illegal)?
But, hey, it is for the good of society to make people not smoke. You should be happy they are charging smokers so much money!
kabbes: “Why not start with the socially unpleasant that we’d like to dissuade?” Good. So we agree about taxing religion. We can come to smoking later; those fucking churches and street preachers are an eyesore. We’ll all be better off after we make that ille–oops, I mean, after we discourage that behavior.
Well, actually, to really make it analogous: [list=1]
[li]Driving must not be a necessity for anyone. This means superb public transport. Economies depend critically on mobility of workforce and commerce, so this needs to be taken care of without the motor vehicle.[/li][li]Tax should be raised so that driving is not an impossibility, but rather a luxury. Obviously this can only work in conjunction with (1).[/list=1]Meet these criteria and you’ll have some merit in the driving::smoking analogy. Until then, it falls woefully short.[/li]
pan
I think there is a vibrant black market in cigs. I know of two smokers that buy all their cigs for about $2.50 a pack. It makes sense that if most of the price of cigarettes is tax that people will find a way around it.
I seem to have touched a nerve. I can only conclude that it is in the language I employed, since the actual concept is straightforward enough; not to mention one employed by many forms of tax.
We increase tax on that which society wishes to discourage, such as cigarettes, alcohol and petrol. We decrease tax on that which society wishes to encourage, such as pensions provision and insurance.
Smoking is anti-social and has serious economic costs to society. It makes sense to tax it heavily to both try and cover these costs and also to discourage the activity. That is my simple message and it is not controversial. And that is all I meant by “we will exact a price for your anti-socialness”.
Well:
a) Since when were churches eyesores? I must tell that to the residents of pretty Shere, though they will be loathe to lose their beautiful 12th century building.
b) To those who believe, religion is neither a luxury nor a choice. Even to addicts, smoking is both - anyone can quit if they really really want to. I fail to see the analogy here.
c) Taxing smoking is in no way analogous to putting pressure against establishment of religion or against free speech. To suggest it can be at best charitably be called hyperbola.
Perhaps the food could be made justifieable: you can survive off of it, after all. it does have some nutritional value.
but what about beer?
it is not life sustaining.
it can be argued that it, too has second hand victims: Ask anyone who has lost someone due to drunk driving. Ask anyone who has had an alcoholic parent.
Kids need to be discouraged from its use also.
Beer Drinkers are horrible litter bugs, too. I am NOT justifying it, but I would much rather run over a cigarette butt instead of a beer bottle.
Excessive drinking impairs your thinking abilities. Smoking 10 packs will not make you wonder how or why it is you woke up next to Bertha the Beast.
[sarcasm] I mean, maybe we should sue The Miller Brewing Company to pay for all the surprise pregancies caused by its product. [/sarcasm]
In this country at least, alcohol is heavily taxed. For precisely the same reasons. So that argument is a non-starter.
Food is not taxed at all, for what I would hope is obvious reasons (except, possibly, in restaurants). And to start picking and choosing what food one should tax would be an extremely tricky path to pursue.
Possibly, if it definitely can be established that:
a) The drinking of soda places an economic burden on the state; and
b) There are unpleasant secondary social consequences as a result of drinking soda.
And also if you could:
c) Pin down precisely an accepted legal definition of “soda”.
Of course, I suspect that you’ll find that the effects are actually pitiful in comparison to smoking. If it were discovered that the drinking of soda has equivalent societal effects to the smoking of cigarettes then it would be hypocritical of me to do anything other than call for a tax. I’ll be dollars to donuts that this isn’t the case.
Got any other outrageously silly analogies to offer me? Or can we just agree that cigarettes are a fairly unique case and that in the few cases where there are comparisons to other products, the state mostly taxes those too?
Sounds like cigarettes have become quite the luxury item! 5 bucks for 20 cigs? How horrible for you. My vice is scotch. I have to pay up to $6.00 for one small glass on the rocks…and that’s for the CHEAP stuff!
I like in the UK BNB. I agree with our tax regime, which includes heavy taxation of alcohol. Your argument is therefore not justified on me. Or to put it another way: yes, your state should be taxing alcohol too.
“What the market will bear” is a concept that applies to more than just an ideal completely free market–it also applies to the real world. A market will bear a certain amount of tax-strain; a market composed (if not entirely, than with a major segment) of addicts will bear more of it than others–thus, high taxes on cigs, alcohol, and gasoline are a better revenue-stream than trying to slap high taxes on, say, basic food staples.
I think that if cigarette taxes ever threatened to destroy the market, they’ll start dropping again–just enough to keep the revenue stream open.
Also, drug legalization will start moving forward not when some sort of enlightenment strikes the hallowed halls of government, but when they’re hungry for more tax revenue.
Beer is indeed taxed more lightly. From The Federation of Tax Administrators we see a list of beer taxes by state, with the US median being something like 18 cents per gallon. (There are some other links to state tax rates at that site. Pretty interesting stuff.) But I’m not sure that the total tax burden on beer is.
When I quit, two years and many tax increases ago, a pack of 25 cigarettes was going for about $8.50. I don’t think $5 a pack is outrageously high.
At home, Dave has just smoked his (hopefully) last cigarette, and the money saved will be put toward things that will not kill him. This greatly pleases me.
I smoked a pack a day for 7 years. I quit 3 months ago.
I complained about the price when I smoked, but no price was too high. I paid over $7.00 a pack out of state when I had to, it didn’t matter. The price did not keep me from smoking.
The biggest price jump in my state came after Philip Morris lost their lawsuit, not from taxes. It is not just the government jerking you around, the cig. companies are getting their share, too.
I quit because I wanted to and I was sick of accommodating my life around cig’s. The extra money I have is just a perk, but between my husband, who also quit, and myself, we have enough for a car payment each month.
The only was to get back at the government and keep them from getting more of your money, not to mention the cig companies, is to quit. (Yes, I know that Philip Morris also has many other products, including Kraft, but damn, I’m not giving up my mac and cheese, too!)
Baltotop. How much are you paying for cigs? I quit 18 months ago, and I was buying my cartons for $24. In Rosslyn, just across the Potomac, there is a cigarette outlet where you can probably get a carton for around $20.00. I recommend that once a month you make a trip to where cigarettes are cheaper and just stock up.
The reasons that smokes are expensive is that you state government has decided to tax them, the federal govt doesn’t tax them that much. The tobacco companies also make a large profit on the product.
That being said is the price really that high? Assuming an average price of about $5.00 a pack, that works out to a cigarette costing 25 cents. That would buy you a gumball in some machines or a pack of Wrigley gum. Around here, that five dollars might buy you a beer in the bar of your choice, or a fast food meal.
The OP said that cigarettes were “important to him and other people”. I was just asking HOW they were important. I’ve never gotten an answer.
They’ve raised the entrance fee to $20, and yes, I noticed the price hike. During busy times of the year, you have to prove that you have reservations before they’ll let you get in - that’s a change I’ve noticed. Pretty soon, they are going to impliment the “Valley Plan”, which will restrict auto access dramatically. I am concerned about all these things, but I am not “whining” about them. And, I beg to differ about “it serves no useful benefit” for me (or anyone else) to go to National Parks. Unless you think that Ansel Adams (and all other artists and photographers, of which I am one) serve no “useful benefit” with their photography and artwork? Unless you think that the National Park System should be abolished, and all National Parks be paved over and made into parking lots? Is that what you think?
You’re not seriously trying to compare the beauty and benefits of National Parks to the habit of smoking, are you?
That’s what the OP claimed. I was just parroting what he said.
Ask the OP why he claims that this is what they are doing, then. Listen, I already said that I can sympathize with the frustration over government interference. But the whining - that just is irritating.