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A comment on 10% of households pay more than 80% of taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. Parent comment

Re:10% of households pay more than 80% of taxes on alcohol a... by JamesBarney on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @02:00PM (#29003832)
In Texas there are 3 million smokers. The avg smoker smoke 14 cigs per day, which is 255 packs per year. A pack of cigarettes is currently taxed at about $5 in Texas. That 3mil255packs$5 = 3.8 billion in tax revenue.

I doubt we're spending anywhere near that much money on cleaning up cigarettes.

Note* these numbers are wrong.

The actual taxes on a pack of cigarettes in Texas are 2.42. i grabbed the $5 from a proposal.

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Re:10% of households pay more than 80% of taxes on alcohol a... by skeeter2020 on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @02:24PM (#29004202)
Your numbers are way off. The average cost is ~ $5.75 of which $1.41 is tax. That's revenues of about a billion per year. Pretty sure we can find a billion dollars in externalities related to smoking.
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Re:10% of households pay more than 80% of taxes on alcohol a... by JamesBarney on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @02:36PM (#29004386)
We're both wrong it's 2.42. you didn't include the federal tax, the $5 was wrong.
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Re:10% of households pay more than 80% of taxes on alcohol a... by robbrown451 on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @02:44PM (#29004511)
We might spend that much if we actually cleaned most of them up.

So maybe we could consider the tax isn't really about cleaning them up, but compensating the rest of us for having to look at them.

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