Cigarette

I have found cheap(er) cigarettes online (I live in NYC). Is it legal to purchase from these sites? It would let me, but I have been afraid to press "Send" on the order!

It is not illegal to buy cigarettes online from a diffeent state. It IS illegal to fail to pay New York State and City cigarette sales tax on those cigarettes. You should buy the cigarettes online, compute the tax on the cigarettes and mail it to the city and state. Otherwise, you are breaking the law.

But, of course, what you should really do is what New York City wanted you to do when they raised the tax in the first place – quit smoking. One half of all people who smoke will die from it.

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Does it support medical care, etc?
I could really use some links to websites explaining this, as well as links to sites with some sort of an opinion paper on what we could place this tax on instead, or about how we could eliminate it compleatly if we were to ban smoking nationwide.
I’m doing a persuasive essay for school in which I am persuading the people in my class to support a nationwide smoking ban.
Help is greatly appreciated. =)
I live in Texas…
Hope that helps.

It depends. Taxes on cigarette sales are collected by the federal and state governments and these taxes go into the governments’ general funds. They are used to pay for everything the government spends money on. In recent decades, whenever an increase to the existing taxes on tobacco has been passed, it has always passed under the argument that smoking causes greater health costs, so the "extra" tax money is supposed to be used to fund these costs, plus programs/advertising to encourage/assist quitting.

If you look at it, it is like a Catch 22. They raise taxes on tobacco to cover additional costs that tobacco causes and to try to get people to quit. But if people quit, then tax revenues from tobacco would go down. The government can’t afford to have these tax revenues disappear, so they will need to raise these taxes again to ensure that their tax revenues from tobacco doesn’t go down. In a way, you could say that the last thing the government would want would be for everyone to just quit smoking one day.

Besides, growing tobacco is a huge part of the economy for many southern states. You won’t see a general ban on smoking (or see tobacco being outlawed), because you would go up against not just the tobacco companies and their lobbyists, but the senators and congressmen from these southern states that rely heavily on tobacco as a part of their economy. You wouldn’t want to be the senator that has to go before their constituents and say that the people that voted him into office is now out of work and on unemployment and is now going to lose their homes to foreclosure because he (or she) voted to outlaw tobacco.

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It is a statutory warning and everybody can read them, so why do they manufacture cigarettes?

There are multiple reasons why cigarettes are manufactured.

First of all, there is a lot of money that goes into lobbying by tobacco manufacturers and states make a huge amount of money off cigarette taxes. That removes any incentive by the state to outlaw the manufacture and distribution of tobacco.

Second, it’s not the state’s responsibility to outlaw products that are unhealthy. There are many products out there that are unhealthy or can be used in unhealthy ways, however it’s an individual’s responsibility to use them wisely.

Third, cigarette sales are banned to minors and they do have the warning labels on them. In this day and age, there is no excuse that anyone doesn’t know the dangers of smoking. At that point, if an adult decides they want to smoke themselves to death, it is up to them.

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