Posted on 09/30/2022 6:27:55 AM PDT by Drango
Pks*
The lions share of a pack of cigarettes or bulk tobacco is taxes. Years ago the cost of a pack of cigarettes quintupled nearly overnight and shortly thereafter the cost of bulk tobacco essentially doubled. This was all taxes.
Whenever you inhale “smoke” from burning tobacco, marihuana or anything, carbon monoxide which avidly binds to hemoglobin rises significantly in your body. This is extremely detrimental to your health and is probably the primary factor in the development of atherosclerosis. Sorry but humans did not evolve in an environment that resulted in chronic high exposures to carbon monoxide and have no inherent capacity to deal with this poison.
Smoking is a terrible thing to do to your health. Almost absurd to worry about diet , exercise, supplements etc. if you smoke.
“So, every pack of cigarettes should be taxed at 50%, and that money saved into the health-care fund. Consuming alcohol, the same.”
They already are... By hundreds of percent. A dollar pack costs $6-$7 after taxes.
Obama did that...
Amazing how the liberal government works. They first take a page out of Alinsky:
RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)
Then they whittle it down to size. This time they started heavy taxing of the products with the first major hits in 1992 to force people to stop using tobacco. Then when enough people have quit for financial reasons, the government continues to stress health reasons because admitting financial reasons leads right back to them and that part of that tax money has gone to pork projects.
But the statement to me that most did not catch was the statement by Dr. Nigar Nargis, Senior Scientific Director, Tobacco Control Research, American Cancer Society:
“As a society, we can mitigate these economic losses through coordinated and comprehensive evidence-based tobacco CONTROL measures, which encourage people to quit smoking and PREVENT people from starting to smoke in the first place.”
They break down the loss to each state and come up with an average of $1100 annually, according to how they consider it. By doing some math, and using just the 50 states, that comes to $55K a year. As of August 24, the amount of arms sent to the Ukraine alone, as we do a lot of “gifts” to many nations, was equal to $600 million. And that’s in less than a year. So if we didn’t help the Ukraine kill people and they had to be responsible for it themselves, we would save enough money, even with the government’s fuzzy math, to pay the tobacco loss for 10,909 years. Not to mention the loss of employment and sales revenue for the small industries like mom and pop stores. And with the trend of small industry stores being attached to gasoline stations there’s no limit to how many birds the government can kill like gas revenue for those that need the tobacco so they fill the tank while there. Applied sales.
Ugly, ain’t it? Freedoms of choice taken away from people in each state for the tune of a so called loss of $1100 a year which is peanuts even if it honestly exists. And the states are even willing to take a tax loss on the product, many times used for roads and grounds, to control the people when all the government gets is tax revenue. And the hits just keep coming because then their paramount infrastructure will go south and they will need to find something else to tax to repair it. And the taxpayer pays it all.
Vote them out. And for those that say well you don’t know what you’ll get, I know what I’ve got.
wy69
“I wonder if the study offsets the cost of treating smoking problems with the healthcare savings from early death rates.”
I read somewhere that smokers get 1-2 major diseases, but non smokers get 3-4. Most smokers will live long enough to make a major contribution to SS, etc, but not long enough to collect. They also don’t spend a decade in the memory unit.
Until recently, most lung cancer patient were just sent home to die. How expensive can that be?
“Until recently, most lung cancer patient were just sent home to die.”
Besides they are hypocrites. Ain’t no money to be made for the industry doing that.
“carbon monoxide”
You just gave an excellent explanation for why homo sapiens should not live in large cities.
Notice that the “health experts” never talk about that!
Still the levels of carbon monoxide in polluted urban atmospheres is not really that high and the levels of carboxyhemoglobin in urban non smokers is not statistically significantly different than rural non smokers. Yet if you smoke or use wood to heat your home, the levels of carbon monoxide rise quickly.
The tobacco taxes collected by govt far outweigh any govt concern over your health.
I would guess that anyone under 40 doesn’t smoke cigarettes - they smoke marijuana instead, which Government now seems to promote.
This is the same journal that published a Hydroxychloroquine study based on 100% fraudulent, manufactured data. They have zero credibility.
I have smoked cigars for decades and use a wood stove in my rural home—and I am still here and healthy as an ox at age 70.
Go figure....
New findings by the American Cancer Society
Great idea!
Another “fund” that immediately gets borrowed from by FedGov, giving them yet another fig leaf excuse to spend even more money we don’t have on wasteful crap.
There are many stupid meaningless terms in the world, but use of the words “trust” and/or “fund” for any money seized by the government is possibly the stupidest.
Smoking is a terrible thing to do to your health.
1) I would propose that all the regulatory additives to cigarettes have caused more problems.
2) In limited quantities a pipe can add much enjoyment to life. Many great thinkers and doers smoked.
Well, no. They're talking about $1,100 of lost income for each person, not $1,100 for an entire state. The total figure cited is $892 billion, not $55,000.
Of course, even if you take the population of the entire U.S. as 350,000,000 and multiply that by $1,100, the total is only $385 billion. I don't know where the other half-trillion is supposed to be coming from, and I'm not going to click on the link to the Lance-It to find out.
Should have banned smoking and stopped vaping before it started. Nope, now we even have legal dope. And people wonder why society is crashing.
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