Hacker News Reader

Comment by DaveExeter | Hacker News Reader

It is actually better if more people smoke. Smokers die sooner, needing less health care in the long run.

Also, social security becomes move solvent.

End of life for smokers is incredibly traumatic and expensive.

That is true for many people, smokers or not. You save money on things like hip replacements, care homes for people who can no longer fend for themselves, etc. etc.

It would be if it were socially acceptable for all of the smokers in question to have the option of assisted suicide when diagnosed with the almost inevitable terminal cancer. As it stands, end of life for a chronic smoker who develops cancer is typically prolonged, painful, and extremely expensive.

Do dead people pay taxes? Whatever is gained for the health care system by people dying early will be lost several times in tax income in general.

47% of Americans don't pay federal taxes (excluding payroll taxes). That's obviously even much higher for people of Medicare age, and retired people aren't paying any payroll taxes. Also, when people die, so does (at least most of) their social security payments.

Smoking is in fact pretty well aligned if all you care about are government revenues: it minimally affects people during their prime working age when they're paying taxes, and then has it's largest effects (i.e. death) when people are older and likely to be a net negative when it comes to government expenditures anyway.

Don't know about that. This is a study (just) for Spain:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6813084/

> Deaths due to lung cancer represented the 28.90% and the 10.83% of all cancer-related deaths in 2017 in males and females respectively, with an increasing tendency in this last group. In addition, the YPPLL count increased in the study period among females. Lung cancer was responsible annually for 60,846 YPPLL, and productivity losses summed €13.1 billion over the 10 year period.

I mentioned this elsewhere but if the sickest (or dead) are concentrated in the oldest segment of the population (not unreasonable as young smokers are still fairly healthy on the grand scheme of things) that isn’t working then this doesn’t hold.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com