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
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.