Description
This article is from the Smokers FAQ,
by jdawson@netcom.com (Joe Dawson) with numerous contributions by
others.
06 Taxes, Costs, Saving The Children
If you're willing to believe the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM),
the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) , or the Con-
gressional Research Service, smokers MORE than pay their own way.
In a NEJM editorial (AP-NY-10-08-97):it states:
"Jan J. Barendregt and others from Erasmus University in the Netherlands
calculated that at any given age, health care costs for smokers are indeed
as much as 40 percent higher than for nonsmokers. And if everyone quit,
health care costs would plummet for a few years. However, nonsmokers live
an average of about seven years longer than smokers, and medical costs for
the elderly are high. So 15 years after everyone quit, total health care
costs would level off at about 7 percent higher for men and 4 percent
higher for women than they were before. "
And, in JAMA.( Manning et al, "The taxes of sin...", JAMA:261:1604
(1989)), researchers found that smokers actually should get paid up to
$1.28/pack by NONSMOKERS to fully equalize the costs/savings ratio.
Finally, a Congressional Research Service study concluded that: "Midrange
estimates ... suggest net external costs from smoking in the range of 33
cents per pack in 1995 prices, an amount that by itself is too small to
justify either current cigarette taxes or the proposed tax increase. "
When arguing that tax increases are needed to reduce teen smoking,
politicians conveniently ignore the fact that European taxes on cigarettes
have always been FAR higher than U.S. taxes; and their rate of teen
smoking has ALSO always been higher. If the real reason for federal tax
increases was simply to price smokes out of the reach of teens they could
easily have gotten them passed simply by offering to rebate the extra taxes
back to adult smokers on their 1040 forms. Did they make such an offer?
Of course not. Saving the kids was never the real motivation to begin with.
It was simply a lie, a smokescreen to steal our money.
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