Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

https://reason.com/2022/04/28/the-fdas-menthol-cigarette-ban...

In addition to condescending assumptions, the FDA is displaying remarkable shortsightedness regarding the practical impact of its policy on the community it supposedly is trying to help. "Policies that amount to prohibition for adults will have serious racial justice implications," the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Drug Policy Alliance, the Sentencing Project, and 24 other organizations warned in an April 2021 letter to Becerra and Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock. "Such a ban will trigger criminal penalties, which will disproportionately impact people of color, as well as prioritize criminalization over public health and harm reduction. A ban will also lead to unconstitutional policing and other negative interactions with local law enforcement."

The ACLU letter noted that "a menthol cigarette ban would disproportionately impact communities of color, result in criminalization of the market, and exacerbate mass incarceration." The ban "also risks creating large underground, illegal markets." That "would be a massive law enforcement problem for states, counties, and cities, since all states treat unlicensed sale of tobacco products as a crime—usually as a felony punishable by imprisonment."

I don't see how a ban necessitates policing at the individual level.

Ban the production and importation of the product, but don't ban anything else. It's much easier to shut down a factory producing them than trying to police every single person caught riding smooth and dirty with some old camels.

The alternative is high taxes on cigarettes. But that would also disproportionately affect lower-class people. As j16sdiz said, every law that bans stuff does this.

And also disproportionately help them, whether such taxes are regressive are not are tough to tell in the aggregate given a large portion of the people who quit will be lower class and have both financial/health benefits but a large portion of the people who don't will be doubly punished (although given these people are likely to be recipients of government aid partially funded by such taxes means it may also be a partial wash)

This is disturbing. Almost all ban disproportionally impact people with lower social economical status. Every fine impacts less weathy people more. Does this meant we should stop all ban?

I believe in Norway or Finland they have tiered fines based on income level to counter that, specifically for driving fines I believe, which seems like another option (although a hard one to do for a consumer product not sold in government stores... maybe tobacco shops will go the way of alcohol shops becoming government run in some states)

The F is the point of busting my ass to work some stupid office job and be financially stable if a minor transgressions is just as ruinous as when I was a janitor? The way you fix the fact that some people are crippled and others aren't isn't to shoot everyone else in the leg.

The ONLY redeeming feature of such policy is that the people who dutifully report each and every cent of income are hit harder than the people who take the "I'll report what they know about" approach and most of the people who support these policies tend to be in the former group and that's pretty paltry as far as silver linings go.

Hard disagree. The law should affect you exactly as much regardless of income. Poverty is not a moral failing and wealthy people should not be above the law, which they effectively are with a fixed-amount fine.

So...for you, the main reason to work hard to earn more money is so that you can break the law and the fines won't matter as much to you?

Pretty much mistake can be financially ruinous when you are living hand to mouth.

Why does the government get the privilege of also being financially ruinous to those who are otherwise financially stable?

The whole point of money is to be able to make problems go away with minimal effort. Government scrutiny is just one type of problem. It's a leaking water heater with a badge and a gun.

> The F is the point of busting my ass to work some stupid office job and be financially stable if a minor transgressions is just as ruinous as when I was a janitor?

(1) Minor transgressions shouldn't be ruinous for anyone including the poor, that's part of the point of scaled penalties.

(2) Ideally, the point would be your quality of life when you are not being punished for crimes, not the ability to be effectively immune to meaningful punishment for crimes that would ruin others.

>(1) Minor transgressions shouldn't be ruinous for anyone including the poor, that's part of the point of scaled penalties.

So then why do scaled penalties only ever seem to be scaled up with income rather then down with lack of?

Because no legislature creates non-scaled fines that are high enough to be meaningfully felt by billionaires, since they would have to be utterly ruinous to us mere mortals.

Why does everyone try and drag the discussion in the direction of a few dozen people who are a rounding error of a rounding error?

Legislators seem happy to create fines that are meaningful if not excessive to everyone with a household income short of two well paid white collar professionals (who themselves are a small minority).

Because they are a very small number of people with a massively outsized amount of power. Allowing them to possess the amount of wealth they do is, by its very nature, unbalancing and damaging to the entire system.

Citation please. That doesn't pass even a cursory sanity test.

The people who are on top of the current system are the last people who want to unbalance, damage it or otherwise rock the boat.

> So then why do scaled penalties only ever seem to be scaled up with income rather then down with lack of?

The two are equivalent, and many scaled fine systems have lower fines for equivalent severity offenses at low income levels than are common in the systems of fixed fines used in the US.

A lot of people get fixated on, e.g., Norway's very high, even at low income levels, traffic fines compared to the US, but that's a product of Norway being a high outlier in how severe traffic violations are considered (and, also, the US being a low outlier.)

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