Afaik smokers and alcoholics are a blessing for most states. What is additionally spent on them due to healthcare costs is far less than the taxes they pay + the retirement payments they don't receive due to premature death.

Funny clip from Yes, Prime Minister https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWxukctTlsY

I think choice is good, and taxing appropriately a good measure. Not sure about today's health and safety obsession in general. Wonder if in today's world (hypothetically given the same technological means as back then) we would ever try something like a lunar landing. And one wonders what we will forbid in 20, 30 or 40 years. Prohibition again? All those "poor people, suffering from alcoholism, disproportionately those who can't afford therapies (esp with regards to long term alcoholism), people on the fringes of society, who we must help, and who can't be trusted to make their own choices, because _we_ know better"?

Oh, you can bet your ass that prohibition of alcohol again is coming far sooner than 20-40 years from now. Newsflash, everybody dies! The government should have no rights to infringe on what people want to consume. This is a slippery slope. I am not pro-cigarette here but pro choice of drug consumption. That, and the distinguishing of cigars and pipe tobaccos from that of what a cigarette really is, which is not natural tobacco. Cigarettes are 50% "mother's liquor," which is ground up floor scrap and stem tobacco parts into a nice little puree with added re-uptake nicotine boosting agents. This is then dried into sheets and chopped up to look like ribbons of tobacco. It is not smoking tobacco naturally. Leave the natural cigars and pipe tobaccos in another category. The FDA is going to target all tobacco cleverly as if it's all the same when they know very well that it is not.

You think all these Addy popping, Vyvanse downing, benzo-calming programmers aren't dying way earlier? You are fooling yourselves so hard.

Ha, I've seen that clip and really enjoyed it. I also am pretty sure I saw some research that says that's not true but I've just been searching the last few mins and can't find it. I have a bunch of files from when I was working in the field that I really need to sort through.

But yeah, I also am concerned about how safety driven we are for things and unwilling to take risks as a culture but that might be recency bias because I'm reading "Where is my flying car?" and they basically make the same point about the regulatory state stymieing innovation in the name of safety (often for absurd things like nuclear)

It's really difficult to come up with good statistics, because of the number of things one can factor in. Tobacco industry in-country producing, or it's imported for example (total cost of cigarette smoking)? How many jobs directly, how many secondary (marketing, product chain, the news stand which sells them). How to factor in second-hand smoking exactly? Are smokers more likely to consume other drugs, if so, why? Because they have a tendency to try, or smoking causes them to try? How do you factor in that? How do you even "measure" that?

With alcohol: how to factor in violence due to alcohol? How much less police incidents Friday / Saturday evening due to less alcohol? But what about people maybe going out less than before, or spending less money when doing so (will they pay the same prize for drinks if there's no alcohol involved)? What about sports betting and gambling industry (where it's legal)? How will it affect illegal drug use (we've been through that, but it's been long enough for people to say "well, it was different than").

Even the death statistic is tough to do. "Pre-mature death due to smoking", maybe the person also was overweight and had diabetes, how do you estimate how long this person would have lived, if they didn't smoke?

In every step of the way is the possibility for variance. Social sciences, from sociology, to psychology, to health, is such a minefield. Medicine of course is half and half. You can do a lot of stuff on the level of biology, chemistry, hard science in a lab, but health benefits/damages are "observed" in practice (observational studies). And the number of problems there are just ... huge.

I could go on and on and on...

>Why not just dramatically increase the taxes so people can still choose to pay a high price if they want to?

If you increased the taxes enough to change behavior, that would imply that people who wanted to smoke were made unable to. If all the people who want Menthols after your tax increase can still afford them, then it would not stop them, by definition. Consequently, vice taxes are always either ineffectual, or a ban that only applies to the poor.

Yeah I mean if you increase prices 1000x it would have that effect but if you increase them closer to what a place like NZ or Aus does (I think like ~75%, it's been a while since I studied this stuff then the cost is offputting for many but it means that the societal costs aren't externalized onto nonsmokers in the form of additional healthcare burden and the like. There's lots of arguments about pigouvian taxes and whether they hurt the poor, but generally they are effective at stopping usage up to a point (as in there is strong correlation between an increase in tax and decrease in usage) and the benefits usually outweigh the costs even for the poor. Patricio Marquez from the World Bank has a bunch of great reports that break this down, often on a country by country basis. CTFK also has info but is a little paternalistic but I really like tobacconomics reports https://tobacconomics.org/

Agreed with your premise in full.

Increasing the price isn't necessarily about making it inaccessible to people so they stop smoking (though it is a minor part of it that is a nice side-effect), it is to make sure that the additional burden placed on the healthcare system by those people is balanced out by taxes paid in form of increased prices on tobacco products.

If people don't stop smoking, then might as well make sure they cover the extra cost they add to the healthcare system. Seems pretty fair.

To be clear, this statement I made has nothing to with my views on the specific menthol ban in question, as I am still not sure how I feel about it. I was just discussing the hypothetical non-existent strategy of just more taxing on tobacco products instead of outright banning them.

>it is to make sure that the additional burden placed on the healthcare system by those people is balanced out by taxes paid in form of increased prices on tobacco products.

That only makes sense in places where the taxes go to healthcare organizations. In the American system, that doesn't happen - there's no way that a city will hand the proceeds of its tobacco taxes to insurance companies.

Yeah, the point isn't to compensate insurers - they for sure get theirs and charge smokers more. It's to compensate healthcare systems and governments who foot the bill for 1) productivity decreases from smoking in the form of more sick days, more breaks, etc. and 2) people who don't have insurance and get cancer and are treated at the taxpayers expense

It's a cash grab, make no mistake about it. They can justify it all they want, but they're fooling you.

Tobacco companies already pay states a bunch of money from their 1998 settlement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...

It's over $200 billion and growing. They're more than compensated.

Cigarettes and tobacco products are already heavily taxed for the user. Both the federal government and the state government makes a lot of money off people's addiction, and it's an addiction they can't break (obviously).

https://igentax.com/cigarette-tax-state/

Time to leave smokers alone. Many if not most of them got hooked as kids and as a society we just keep punishing them for their "moral failure."

> Consequently, vice taxes are always either ineffectual, or a ban that only applies to the poor.

A 10% increase in tobacco price results in a 4% decrease in tobacco demand: https://www.who.int/tobacco/economics/taxation/en/

I don't know if that counts as "ineffectual" in your book, but its not nothing.

Hence the second half of the branch: "or a ban that applies only to the poor."

Couldn't you say the same of all luxury products?

If they're expensive because policy set the prices then yes, that would be a ban.

1. Smoking citizens are - on average - productive until retirement, but use up much less pension money. So the cynical policy would be the opposite.

2. When you increase taxes you get smuggling and illegal dealing with all the violence it brings.

1. I'm skeptical as the age of retirement keeps going up. Have a source? 2. Agreed that's an issue in contexts with low rule of law but I think that's less of an issue here than say Ukraine/Russia/DRC where there is serious smuggling

My argument is too simple to need sources:

Assume that, on average, smokers die at 75, non smokers die at 80, and everyone gets social security pensions at 65.

Then smokers pensions only cost 67% of non smokers pension, even though they pay in 100% as much.

My numbers are surely wrong, but all that matters is that smokers die earlier than non smokers.

This is also the hard to realize way Social Security redistributes from the poor and unhealthy to the well off and healthy.

So does life expectancy. You retire later, but in total amount of years retired per person? Probably even more today still? I don't think "standard retirement age" tracks perfectly with life expectancy.

Also consider. The life expectancy of a 60 year old is above average. At age 60 you have already "survived" quite a lot of danger (adolescent drug abuse, driving accidents while young, opportunity to be a soldier in a war, crimes of passion in your twenties, mid life crisis, et cetera). So the life expectancy of a 60 year old is above the "average life expectancy", as many die before ever reaching that age.

Isn't economics fun?

Doesn't banning something also give you smuggling and illegal dealing? Like currently all drugs and back when alcohol was illegal?

It does. You can think of a ban as an infinite tax.

Because addicts are not price sensitive.

Some are. Stealing this from a post above

A 10% increase in tobacco price results in a 4% decrease in tobacco demand: https://www.who.int/tobacco/economics/taxation/en/