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Comment by _qulr | Hacker News Reader

> high tobacco taxes to reduce smoking

This ends up just penalizing poor people. Cigarettes are addictive. Higher taxes don't magically cure addictions. Anyway, lots of things in the world are bad for you. But it's a free country. If someone wants to smoke and drink and eat a bunch of junk and never exercise, they have that right. There are a ton of "bad" things you could tax, it's an endless futile exercise.

> high fuel taxes to reduce pollution

Does this actually even work? My own driving behavior is completely unaffected by gas prices. People still need to go places. It seems to me that convenient public transportation would do better in affecting behavior. If public transport is crap/inconvenient/nonexistent, people won't use it.

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Your comment is not true, there were numerous studies on the impact of high taxation of tobacco products and strong evidence that it does help even for people of low socioeconomical status[1].

[1] Bader P, Boisclair D, Ferrence R. Effects of tobacco taxation and pricing on smoking behavior in high risk populations: a knowledge synthesis. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2011;8(11):4118-4139. doi:10.3390/ijerph8114118

Quote from the above article:

"There was strong evidence that raising cigarette prices through increased taxes is a more effective tobacco control policy measure for reducing smoking behavior among youth, young adults, and persons of low socioeconomic status, compared to the general population."

I just looked at the article. Unfortunately it has very little data about how much smoking is reduced by higher taxes. The one bit of actual numbers I found: "On average, a price increase of 10% on a pack of cigarettes would reduce demand for cigarettes by about 4% for the general adult population in high income countries".

That's great, for the small percentage of people who quit smoking. But for the majority who continue smoking after higher taxes, it is indeed as I said, "This ends up just penalizing poor people." It's blatantly obvious if you go to any convenience store that smoking has not been stopped by higher cigarette taxes, and thus a lot of people are simply paying more in taxes while continuing to smoke.

It's interesting that the article talks about the effect of cigarette taxes on youth, because currently in the US, retailers are forbidden to sell any nicotine product to anyone under age 21. If anything, it seems that the issue is not taxes but rather our extremely lax enforcement of the law against selling cigarettes to minors.

When the demand is more inelastic, as it would be for fuel, the taxes need to be a lot higher to change your demand. I bet you would drive less if the gas tax was 500%.

> I bet you would drive less if the gas tax was 500%.

Possibly. But neither the article author nor anybody else is suggesting a 500% sales tax.

Moreover, super high sales tax that significantly reduces consumption directly conflicts with the original goal of taxes: to raise revenue for government services.

Freedom in this context always effectively means the freedom to make a profit. Are people getting addicted? Well who are you to infringe on the tobacco industry’s right to make a buck?

But after all the cigarette butts we don’t make a fuzz about the tobacco industry’s agency any more; they were just vessels for the lifestyle choices of the smokers.

Weed is still illegal in a lot of places. I guess because you can make less of a profit off of it compared to certain pharmaceuticals. Things are opening up though, perhaps in the US in particular.

> Are people getting addicted? Well who are you to infringe on the tobacco industry’s right to make a buck?

There are 2 issues here:

1) Higher taxes are a very strange and indirect way of stopping something that's considered unacceptable. Suppose we made murder legal and simply taxed "hit" contracts with a very high rate. That would be crazy, right? But that seems to be our policy with cigarettes. If we're serious about stopping smoking, then we'd make it illegal, and put the tobacco companies out of business entirely.

2) Tobacco companies specifically target children, who aren't mature enough to make good choices, and then the kids get hooked on nicotine for life. So that needs to be addressed specifically. I'm amenable to protecting kids, but much less so about paternalism for adults. Again, though, I don't see tax policy as the answer here.

If you consider nicotine addiction to be a moral issue, which it might be, then there are very perverse incentives involved in taxing cigarettes, because the government is making money from something it considers immoral. I would also mention the addiction that many state governments have to lottery ticket revenue.

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