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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

Would it make more sense to properly tax those negative externalities instead of having some authority just picking one use case as "bad"?

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It might work if nicotine wasn't addictive. And because it is, the rational actor hypothesis goes out of the window, and taxing it is just going to hurt poor people who are addicted to nicotine.

This is only banning disposable vapes. The goal doesn't seem to be to cut down on smoking but on waste from disposable vapes.

How would an additional tax address this? Paying more would hardly reduce usage, and definitely won't incentivize users to dispose of vape pens more responsibly.

I can imagine a tax so high that it's effectively a ban, and a tax half that size that might be a compromise between black and white ban/no ban

The UK taxed tobacco to high heaven and I don't think it did much to actually curb use. It's subject to the usual 20% VAT, plus an extra 16.5%, plus a flat £6.33 on 20 packs, so well over half of the sale price of tobacco is just tax.

https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-shopping/alcohol-tobacco

The people I know that would be affected by this just get duty free from corner shops under the table now. Last I heard it's around 8 quid for 50g of rolling tobacco instead of £38 buying legit.

Wouldn't be surprised to find out they smoke more than they used to with it being less scarce.

Tobacco smoking has been on a downward trend since at least the 70s, from 50 to 13%, and taxes have steadily gone up since then in real terms, but I'm surprised to see that the period when the government raised taxes the most is about the only flat part of the curve.

https://ash.org.uk/uploads/Smoking-Statistics-Fact-Sheet.pdf... https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/tobacco-bulletin/hi...

I would rather the government outright bans things rather than pseudo-banning them via the back door via taxes. At least then they have to expend an appropriate amount of political capital, and there is a proper amount of debate over it.

We had in the UK the sugar tax which was an effective ban on added sugar in soft drinks - you can hardly buy any drink without artificial sweeteners now, all of the old formulations were taken off the market because they were uneconomical. However, it never prior received attention as a ban, it was always described as just a "tax".

Do bottle deposits (a few cents that you get back for returning empty soda or whatever bottles to the right place) actually work? If they do, maybe the same model would work for this.

Denmark's bottle return system receives 92% of bottles and cans.

It could pay for additional people to clean up the streets, or you have a deposit on them, so that they be returned rather than littered.

It would encourage usage of reusable vapes, but still give people the option of a disposable vape of they for example forgot their reusable vape when traveling.

Simply, we should charge for negative externalities (not only for vapes) and let people decide what's valuable to them.

I think so but the practical issues are:

Tax is one big pool of money and I doubt the money will be used to fix the issues created.

A similar idea, carbon taxes and carbon credits trading seemed politically dead at least in my country even though it is a fantastic idea.

Edit: what might work is a 5-10 British pound ransom, released on return of the disposible to a recycling centre. Give the used devices free to a reclaiming merchant that operates out of the same country.

IMO the point of charging for negative externalities isn't necessarily to fund remediation of the negative externality but to internalize the cost and force the actor to make a decision about value to them and cost based on the real cost.

If batteries are a waste issue they should be more expensive till we as society feel we are adequately compensated for the externality created. We shouldn't pick and choose what use cases are valid for others. Everyone has different circumstances and preferences.

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