How Cigarettes Tax the Poor
priceonomics.com
priceonomics.com
But when cigarette taxes go up, youth smoking goes down. Reductions in youth smoking mean permanent, ongoing reductions in overall cigarette consumption, as young people fail to take up the habit.
This is not a controversial assertion. Even priceonomics' cherry-picked sources primarily discuss price inelasticity in adult smokers, who have been addicted for decades.
These taxes are cruel, but necessary. It's a pigouvian tax that literally saves lives.
And with modern technology it can only get better. For example, why not create an algorithm that scores how healthy your choices at the grocery store are and introduce the appropriate tax in the end?
We are also on the verge of being able to monitor everyone's every movement. Why not tax those who don't exercise enough?
Imagine how much the average lifespan will increase when people finally give up on outdated notions of personal freedom and irrational choices.
Apparently the cigarette industries' attempts to associate smoking with personal freedom in advertisements have been successful in your case.
I think the health benefits by far outweigh any perceived personal freedom costs. Smoking is damaging but addictive. Too many people want to but don't manage to stop.
If higher prices help reduce smoking, I'm for higher prices.
Not really, I used to smoke but I quit.
That's a straw man, and also quite patronizing. You can hold a rational ethical position without buying into the mythology of Marlboro man. The question still stands: if you accept that health benefits can outweigh personal freedom, where do you draw the line?
"I don't do X because I think it's bad - let's tax/shame/incarcerate anybody who does X, because they're too stupid to realize how bad X is! Think of the children!!!"
and
"I can't believe they're taxing Y! I've been doing Y for years, and it's my business. It's a 'free' country!"
When they stop doing so, of course. It depends on how much you value different kinds of personal freedom.
I for example believe that it would be reasonable to tax unhealthy food more than healthy food and have people who are overweight pay more for their health insurance. But I don't think that tracking everyone's movement outweighs potential benefits from taxing lack of physical activity.
Furthermore, there are medical conditions--and even treatments for medical conditions--that can cause obesity that have nothing to do with a person's diet. Should the people suffering from these situations be charged more for their health insurance?
Here's a real-world example:
A friend of mine's wife was, at the time they discovered she was pregnant, diagnosed with leukemia. It has been the most awful thing I've witnessed in some time. A mid-five-foot woman, who probably barely weighed 120 pounds, after months of different treatments, wound up with a host of medical complications, then further treatments. This all wound up causing her to gain what looked like probably 100+ pounds. Last year, they paid over $18K in out-of-pocket medical expenses.
It seems unconscionable to me to advocate my friend and his wife should have to pay more for health insurance because she's now technically obese. They can already barely survive (she cannot work, and he spent 5 months unemployed last year).
Bottom line: very few things are simply black-and-white. There are so many shades of gray. The real world is full of myriad complications and counterexamples that ought to help us realize we can't just draw simplistic lines in the sand based on silly, poorly conceived premises. Oh sure, it sounds good when the idea pops in your head, especially when it doesn't affect you--always because your conception doesn't ever include you. But it's bound, like all things, to come down with undeserved and unbalanced harshness on somebody. And that leads to having to probe whether or not these ideas are just and fair. Oftentimes, they are not.
While there has been plenty of disagreement in nutrition science, there's also a lot of agreement. It's pretty well established that highly processed foods that are loaded with sugar, salt and fat are less healthy than fresh vegetables. When the science changes, laws can also change, and we don't have to have laws that are so specific as to make the "perfect" diet free and any other diet prohibitively expensive.
Examples like your friend that have a hard time controlling their calorie intake due to medical complications are pretty rare. But indeed, as you say, things are not black and white, which is why, in general, laws are fairly complex and it needs lawyers to understand them. It's not like the current tax code doesn't have any special cases for exceptional circumstances. But figuring out all the special cases needed for a tax code that rewards healthy behaviour is probably way out of scope for a HN comment thread.
I don't see cigarettes as a personal freedom issue. As long as you find people insensitive enough to smoke in public areas and force those of us that don't smoke to breathe their toxic air, cigarettes should be taxed just like other pollutants are. Taxes are one of the few ways that capitalism has of dealing with externalities.
I feel the same way about cars. Your statement fits perfectly:
As long as you find people insensitive enough to drive/idle in public areas and force those of us that don't to breathe their toxic air, cars should be taxed just like other pollutants are.
And that's a slippery slope. What makes you think the line can't actually be drawn. I'm all for personal freedom generally though, but I think adjusting the position of the line to find it's optimal balance is a fine alternative to erasing it altogether.
Agreed. I hate using these terms, but the "progressive liberal agenda" that wants to make "HealthCare Free For All" will make your health choices everyone's business.
I'm not paying for your triple bypass surgery, therefor red meat is going to be taxed higher. Etc...etc... Carry it all out to it's logical conclusion and you'll see that soon enough personal freedom won't mean much in a collectivist society and there will be no line to draw.
Then they converge in the middle, and methodically slaughter any chance at rationally examining the science, with their sharp blades made from laminated dollar bills.
Politics and science do not mix well. Some may not like that other people eat beef steaks. Others may not like enriched white flour or high fructose corn syrup. Some people might not like genetically modified whatevers, or artificial hormone treated this-and-thats. But I don't want my diet to be constrained on all sides by FUD and scaremongering.
Besides that, I don't believe that cigarettes are taxed heavily as a means to benefit the public health. I believe that they are taxed heavily because nicotine addicts will just pay that much for a fix. The supposed health benefit just makes it easier for other people to ignore that a consumer product is being selectively taxed at a scandalously high rate.
Exactly this. Cigarettes aren't being taxed out of any semblance of altruistic care for public health--that altruistic care is arguably borne out in anti-smoking laws in public places. The taxes, however, are simply a shakedown, like every other type of "sin tax" levied to collect money from people who enjoy a thing that cannot or will not be universally defended as something that is "okay" to enjoy.
There is no inherent reason why anyone's health choices need to be anyone else's business if we were to suddenly awake and find ourselves delighted by the existence of universal public healthcare. We decide as a society what is up for discussion. We can actually agree to respect everyone's personal freedom to make their own choices, and reject allowing John's choice to eat a steak now and again to be any of Mary's business. After all, we're going to do the same when we tell John he has to shut the fuck up about Mary's choice to consult with her physician about an abortion. And, of course, we'll agree that neither John nor Mary gets to say anything about Phil's third visit to rehab this year.
Instead, we steer the national discussion away from finger-pointing, privacy-invading, witch-hunting bullshit, and focus it toward elevating a national ideal of living healthy, responsible, active lives. Sure, there are going to be choices made that don't fit the ideal, but we prize personal freedom. We equally protect everyone. We equally care for everyone. Why? Because there are people who eat red meat who never have triple-bypass surgery; people who smoke who never die of smoking complications; people who drink who never have alcohol-related health issues; people who never eat meat who wind up with some other health issue. We can take care of each other because we want to create and inhabit a great society.
Sure, it may be a pipe dream we never see realized in our own lifetimes. But it ought not be so difficult to imagine alternatives, recognize some valuable principles, and advocate for realizing those principles because they inherently respect and value people as co-citizens in a shared society.
It is lobbying by the alcohol and tobacco industry that has kept these respective products as socially acceptable, in spite of the harm caused by smoking, drunk driving, and alcoholism, etc. My view on this matter is pragmatic and impure: society lead by its influencers decides the evil du jour. Sometimes they make good choices and sometimes poor. The world didn't collapse when cigarette taxes started to increase, the tobacco makers didn't die as a result of the lawsuits, and everyone moved on to e-cigarettes.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/01/06/wasserman-schultz-fueled...
The insurance industry wants to not have to pay for your care. The government wants you to not be sick.
Somewhere around harmful (not just unhealthy) addictive substances.
(Philosophical(?) question: is it personal freedom when you're addicted?)
If you want the public to make healthier choices, do it the right way, with scaremongering and emotional rhetoric. Or rational argument, I guess, if you're some kind of quixotic masochist.~
If addiction is your criterion, just pick one of the things you classify as "just unhealthy", and type "X addiction" into google :)
This may have worked but the article notes.
> some economists believe that recent hikes have had little impact on consumption. They suggest that the majority of people who were going to stop because of price hikes might have already done so.
From the paper linked under 'some economists'
> Estimates indicate that, for adults, the association between cigarette taxes and either smoking participation or smoking intensity is negative, small and not usually statistically significant. Our evidence suggests that increases in cigarette taxes are associated with small decreases in cigarette consumption and that it will take sizable tax increases, on the order of 100%, to decrease adult smoking by as much as 5%.
That suggests we may have reached the limit where additional taxes are able to reasonably achieve their goal. If the taxes aren't actually working then I think something else should be done instead of just jacking up the price more and more.
Higher prices damage the only people that really need any help: those who have already been helplessly addicted for decades. These people are - statistically - poor, under-educated, and unhealthy. Making them pay more than they already have to is just pouring more gasoline over the fire.
Don't fool yourself - you're advocating for the further crippling of these addicts' finances and lives. And in doing so, you're giving even more money to the state, which will just mismanage the money and use it to line its own pockets.
This is a profoundly American viewpoint. If you assume everyone mismanages funds, you don't give them enough funds to really deliver value on, so they look mismanaged. The rest of the world has relatively well functioning governments despite having quite a bit more responsibility
What?
>The rest of the world has relatively well functioning governments despite having quite a bit more responsibility.
Define well-functioning. By my definition, they are absolutely not.
Calling something childish is not an argument.
Being underfunded is no excuse, they could be efficient and get the most out of the money they take (by force, don't forget my friend). If they were, then you can argue we should fund them further.
I'm still eagerly awaiting your definition of well-functioning and an explanation for how the "rest of the world" fall under that definition.
> If you assume everyone mismanages funds, you don't give them enough funds to really deliver value on
Why on Earth would you assume that? I don't give anybody tax money. Considering how much god damned money my country spends murdering innocent civilians in the MENA region, I'd say you're looking at it backwards.
> The rest of the world has relatively well functioning governments
I've passed through nearly four dozen embassies in my day, and never have I met a "well-functioning" government throughout that broad experience. I think you're full of shit, and are just recycling old "isms" that don't apply to the modern world.
For one thing, taxing your grocery cart will not powerfully alter the behavior of people not shopping for the groceries. Tobacco taxes work primarily because we prevent new smokers from taking up the habit, not by alteration of existing smokers consumption patterns.
I do strongly favor substantial increases in alcohol taxes, across the board, for similar reasons to tobacco.
second-hand smoke also affects people around the smokers
The difference between smoking and eating unhealthy/not exercising enough is that smoking affects other people in a very real way through second-hand smoking. So smoking is not just about a single person's freedom of choice because it affects every one around the smoker. It affects those who have decide not to smoke but are now forced to either hold their breath waiting for the bus or breath in the smoke.
I hate to be that guy, but the effects of second-hand smoke studies happened long enough after this all got sufficiently politicized to where I'll (conveniently) take them at face value, but I'll never completely trust them. Simple bias confirmation is sufficient to explain the preponderance of the literature.
The latency times for tobacco effects in general make it a doozy of a thing to study. By the time the information gets to lunkheads like me, it's hash.
Most people start smoking to be "cool" or because their friends smoke (or both). It's a fact that very few people start to smoke after their eighteenth birthday. If we remove the access to cigarettes and make it uncool to smoke, I firmly believe very few people would start. (I'd be ok with a period of cigarette prescriptions, so all those who smoke now and want to keep doing it could in non-public spaces.)
With alcohol it's different, most people start to drink to get wasted, of course some level of "coolness" is involved and to a large degree friends, but the lure of getting high is there. Alcohol seems to fill an almost universal need for intoxication (and if it's not alcohol it's some other drug).
> The latency times for tobacco effects in general make it a doozy of a thing to study
Sure, but given that the damaging effects of smoking has been proven, I for one would rather play it safe. I want to have my freedom to choose when to expose myself to something that may be damaging to my body and my body alone. I don't want that choice to be done for me by someone else just because they feel like lighting up while we wait for the bus or whatever.
I get not wanting to be exposed , but the science is still not exactly slam dunk even today, in the same way that even the 1965 Surgeon's General report is. The datasets ( which are admittedly very slow and expensive to cultivate ) aren't of very high diversity.
What do you propose should be taxed?
Taxes are on things you buy.
By the way people who don't exercise will pay taxes on medicines and health care later. So yeah, some way of taxing that already exists.
I don't think it was this article, but it's something like this: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/03/15/174358638/a-sur...
I pay taxes to subsidize the training of NHS Doctors and Nurses not flipping Baristas and other Mc Jobs.
[0] http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=381957
The [flawed] studies already in existence suggest that a single dose of LSD is more effective against alcoholism than an entire year of AA meetings. Anec-data from self-experimenters reporting online suggest that ibogaine interrupts the psychological component of heroin addiction and eases the acute physical withdrawal symptoms for several hours.
Nicotine addiction seems especially tenacious, to the point where you have to pass the 3 year mark of continuous abstinence before anyone can even be 90% confident that you have quit for good. 90% of freshly resolved quitters relapse, most within 3 months.
By those standards, 23.6% is great, but I wonder if that is evaluated at the 3 year mark, or at an earlier time, when the confidence that the person will not relapse is lower.
I might have missed that part, but where's the definitively proven causal link between cigarette tax rate and young people declining to pick up the habit?
Cruelty is bad.
See Myth 3: The Economics of Tobacco at 'The World Bank' site.
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTHEALTHNUT...
The lottery may be a horribly-regressive tax, but it's better than the situation that existed before it was legalized. It's akin to the situation with illegal drugs. If governments started selling them at a slightly-lower price and with higher quality standards, you could still argue that providing drugs to people is making them less healthy. But the situation would be better than what we have today since the states would be making the profit, we'd be rid of the associated crime and many of the overdoses that result from variable quality of street drugs.
If two people have the same exact habit it will cost them the same amount. If I have a higher income than you I'm actually paying less relative of my income than I would with a normal tax.
This is true even not considering the social aspect of it. Some of this taxes are on addictive things like drugs (tobacco, alchool) and gambling (lottery). And one social influence of addictive behaviour is poverty.
The lottery, however, is worse. It is actively advertising to these people, encouraging them to have hopes and dreams about a way out of their situation, but instead it just kicks them while they're down. And it's not just some soulless corporate entity doing this, no: it's the same government which purports to care about their plight, not just exploiting them but encouraging them to passively hope for unearned success, instead of pursuing goals as an independent actor or something which might actually improve their lot.
"Hey, you never know!" is a dystopian lie, a few increments worse than "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!"
Buying lottery tickets looks irrational on basis of expected value, but it is a very narrow and somewhat self-contradictory definition of rationality.
"Why stop? You are going to die anyway. And don't you deserve to die? You are smoking after all. No point in stopping now. Not like your life was ever going to go anywhere."
This is due to an active propaganda campaign.
It seems to me that taxes are beneficial to poor people, as government spending benefits the poor the most. At least that's the theory.
Or they can directly redistribute the cigarette tax money to the poor.
The most recent ads by the Truth campaign are great. I'm a very sporadic smoker of pipes and cigars, but those commercials about cutting off the source of money for tobacco companies by going after non-cigarette tobacco really got my attention. If I buy another ounce of tobacco this year I'm going to at least put on my hipster hat and procure some tobacco that isn't produced by some massive multinational company with very questionable ethics.
1. Poverty.
2. Addiction to a substance and delivery mechanism poisonous to both the user and those around them.
Taxes are among the methods to reduce the prevalence of the latter, as well as to capture negative externalities of their sale. No reason to reduce those.
Addressing poverty and inequality generally, however, would be a Good Thing.
Just like alcohol, it seems to be people that willingly want to be taxed.
I don't see it as a problem.
Tobacco activates the pleasure centres of the brain. Just like food, sex, drinking, or some illegal drugs. So you get a "reward" each time you partake, with smoking being particularly rewarding.
A lot of poor people are trying to "treat" underlying unhappiness or stress, sometimes without knowing it (sometimes fully aware). It isn't a lack of understanding about the health risks, it is both an addiction, and the "least bad" alternative for what they're trying to accomplish (improve happiness, treat depression, decrease stress, etc).
It may surprise the smug but there are a lot of very intelligent people who have addictions (e.g. drinking, drugs, eating, smoking, etc), including doctors, PhD holders, and award winning theorists. You're seriously misguided if you think it is because they lack information/health warnings.
Also, I wasn't saying they lacked awareness of the medical claims about the harms of smoking, I was saying, in my estimation, that they were not weighing that information when they picked up a cigarette (because they were drunkenly rambling about the suppression of cancer cures...).
They're addicted.
I grew up in the US in the 80s and 90s, where we were bombarded with anti-smoking ads, the health effects were well known, and the prices were high.
It blows my mind that I have peers who smoke. They would have seen the same ads, had the same facts available, and mostly come from similar backgrounds (middle-class).
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
Or in comic form:
Nicotine is a stimulant that elevates the mood almost like magic.
The numbers are particularly telling if you look at schizophrenia sufferers. People with schizophrenia are about 2.5 time more likely to smoke than people without.
While most of these are far less severe than smoking (perhaps obesity, drinking give it a run for its money), all of them are bad for our health in the long term and we know it, but we do it anyway. There's plenty of information out there to know about it, it's not like people don't know alcohol or burger king is bad for you. So why do people do it?
When you answer that question you'll have the answer to your question.
A lot of especially young people just plain do not care what happens to them when they are 70.
-- Norm Macdonald
You've answered your own question: rebellion.
That was the main reason I was sneaking cigs in the alley after school.
Just ads, ads and ads. That generates a tobacco culture with smokers and non-smokers, but both just saw ads.
Because tobacco smells and tastes nice (cigarettes mostly don't, but cigarettes are to the tobacco world as McDonald's is to the hamburger world). It stems the appetite and heightens the mind.
Why don't more people start to smoke?
Plus, smoking a cigarette feels really good. Once you're addicted, they don't, but until then they just feel really nice.
Behaviors are "contagious" that way. Gun violence and suicide have been shown to be "transferrable".
That's not addiction, that's just me enjoying a smoke.
The addiction part lasts weeks; the behavior modification part is for the rest of your life.
Life is not a calculus problem...
Coming from someone who used to smoke 2 packs a day, the addiction wasn't from the cigarettes themselves. It was from the life I had. I was depressed, had a dead end job, a shit relationship, family problems, etc. I tried to quit a number of times, but had many difficulties due to the fact that everything around me was constantly on fire.
I finally quit when things picked up. It was still a challenge going from around 40 cigarettes a day to none (cold turkey), and I ended up saying some things I definitely shouldn't have in the process, but I did it.
It's a similar story for many smokers. Also, if anything, it was blown out of proportion in the 90's. Things seem to have calmed down since then.
Even when smoking wasn't considered dangerous at all, people willingly started doing it. The danger factor is more recent (the last 80 years or so).
I'm split on this tax though since it's a sin tax so on one hand it doesn't really work to tax someone who isn't a smoker but on the other it's not working so why increase the burden on the poor unless it's preventing new smokers?
Medications tax the sick that need them. Cigarettes sure as hell don't tax smokers.
(And yes, I smoke myself).
What a strange statistic! It's conflating the difference in cigarette spend and the difference in the incomes of top and bottom thirds to give us a meaningless number.