they really don’t make any sense when they say they need the revenue in one breath and with the other say higher prices will deter young smokers…at a point the tax revenue will fail to exist, or be basically moot…
a leading economist said in an article that health costs from smokers passed on to taxpayers is offset by the smoker dying younger on average…he said many people don’t want to figure this into the formula, but they must to get an accurate picture..he said that states actually save money on smokers, even with the added health costs, and that if states were serious about saving money, they should actually cut taxes and reward smokers…
i agree with the economist, alot of the other dribble is written by anti-smokers, period.
It’s the typical short-sighted liberal tax and spend mindset. Nothing new.
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.