Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace
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Re: Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace
#2The reality is that tobacco taxes fund a lot of the government, and there is no replacement for that income source if people stop smoking cigarettes. Thus the tobacco companies are happy to lobby against e-cigarettes to protect their revenue stream and the government is happy to support them because it's their revenue stream too.
It's unfortunate, because it's largely a tax on the poor. The rich can afford prescription nicotine replacement and the higher healthcare costs for smokers. The poor can't, so they just die.
(I don't smoke, so I have no skin in this game. But I feel like if the government needs money, they should tax people proportionally to their income, rather than according to their bad habits. People are self-interested and will always want more income, so there's a steady revenue stream. But if we want to tank public infrastructure because people decide they want to break an unhealthy habit, that's ultimately self-destructive to society.)
Re: Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace
#3[deleted]
Re: Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace
#4The reality is that tobacco taxes fund a lot of the government, and there is no replacement for that income source if people stop smoking cigarettes. Thus the tobacco companies are happy to lobby against e-cigarettes to protect their revenue stream and the government is happy to support them because it's their revenue stream too. It's unfortunate, because it's largely a tax on the poor. The rich can afford prescripti…
I realize this often isn't the case, but the pursuit of taxing specific behaviors is supposed to only be used to fund things caused by that behavior: that way if some people are costing the government money, they pay the price rather than all of society, making everyone's incentives align. If those people stop doing the thing, then the cost is gone and the government should not care that they aren't collecting the money to pay for it anymore. As an example: taxing people who use roads to pay for roads encourages people to use roads less, which puts less wear on the road surface and means you need fewer lanes and thereby less road. If this mechanism is used correctly, and I realize it often isn't, the real problem is only when there is no good way to directly tax the damage and so a proxy is used: we don't tax people for miles driven, we tax them by the gallon of gas purchased, and while that works for pollution control (and people thereby think it makes sense that people who use less gas have to pay less gas tax, under an assumption that the goal is to encourage less burning of gas), the taxes are used to fund roads, and electric cars still put as much wear on the road as gasoline cars; this screws up the incentives and makes the government kind of want people to keep burning gas so they keep getting taxes to fund the roads they continue to need. But this is a slightly different problem than what you are describing. In the case of cigarettes, I was under the impression the goal of the tax was to fund public health infrastructure due to the cost to the public of caring for victims of smoking, and so while I realize the government always mixes their accounts and crosses purposes and generally screws this up, if e-cigarettes are generally safe then that should have been a case of working incentives.
Re: Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace
#5The reality is that tobacco taxes fund a lot of the government, and there is no replacement for that income source if people stop smoking cigarettes. Thus the tobacco companies are happy to lobby against e-cigarettes to protect their revenue stream and the government is happy to support them because it's their revenue stream too. It's unfortunate, because it's largely a tax on the poor. The rich can afford prescripti…
I agree that regressive taxes (actual govt. issued taxes or implied taxes like smoking in your argument) are a tough case - especially when the people they most affect are sometimes strong supporters of the tax not being stopped.
Lottery games are an example of this - the people who play are overwhelmingly poor. This article argues that lottery spending may even be the single largest tax poor families pay [1].
With regard to what you say about there being no replacement income for governments if people stopped smoking cigarettes - I'd say this is only the case if consumption was banned. If it was slowly phased out the pain wouldn't be noticeable. It's like autonomous vehicles - what really matters is the speed of creative destruction.
[1] http://metrocosm.com/could-the-lottery-be-the-largest-tax/
Re: Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace
#6The reality is that tobacco taxes fund a lot of the government, and there is no replacement for that income source if people stop smoking cigarettes. Thus the tobacco companies are happy to lobby against e-cigarettes to protect their revenue stream and the government is happy to support them because it's their revenue stream too. It's unfortunate, because it's largely a tax on the poor. The rich can afford prescripti…
Every period has its black sheep.
The government can replace its tobacco tax with a carbon tax.
Re: Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace
#7The reality is that tobacco taxes fund a lot of the government, and there is no replacement for that income source if people stop smoking cigarettes. Thus the tobacco companies are happy to lobby against e-cigarettes to protect their revenue stream and the government is happy to support them because it's their revenue stream too. It's unfortunate, because it's largely a tax on the poor. The rich can afford prescripti…
I realize this often isn't the case, but the pursuit of taxing specific behaviors is supposed to only be used to fund things caused by that behavior: that way if some people are costing the government money, they pay the price rather than all of society, making everyone's incentives align. If those people stop doing the thing, then the cost is gone and the government should not care that they aren't collecting the mo…
>>I realize this often isn't the case, but the pursuit of taxing specific behaviors is supposed to only be used to fund things caused by that behavior:
That is only for the press release.. It is never actually that way. Almost all taxation applied to a general fund, meaning all taxes are simply put in a large pool, then various programs are funded from that pool.
There are almost never any actual legal rules that requires say a Gasoline tax to only be used for roads, or a cigarette tax to only be used for Health Programs
For this reason, and many others, I never support using Taxation for social control
Government should not be using tax policy to incentive or decentivize any activity. Taxation should be used to fund X program period.
Taxation should be generalized, AKA a income tax, a sales tax, etc. There should not be special taxes applied to individual products or product types
Re: Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace
#8The reality is that tobacco taxes fund a lot of the government, and there is no replacement for that income source if people stop smoking cigarettes. Thus the tobacco companies are happy to lobby against e-cigarettes to protect their revenue stream and the government is happy to support them because it's their revenue stream too. It's unfortunate, because it's largely a tax on the poor. The rich can afford prescripti…
Why can't people who can't afford cigarettes stop? Is nicotine gum that much more expensive than cigarettes?
Re: Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace
#9The reality is that tobacco taxes fund a lot of the government, and there is no replacement for that income source if people stop smoking cigarettes. Thus the tobacco companies are happy to lobby against e-cigarettes to protect their revenue stream and the government is happy to support them because it's their revenue stream too. It's unfortunate, because it's largely a tax on the poor. The rich can afford prescripti…
do you have access to some detailed data about state/federal income sources? cursory search says excises are around 3% of total taxation income, while on state level goes up to 14% (but still includes all sources, not just tobacco)
Re: Safer to Puff, E-Cigarettes Can’t Shake Their Reputation as a Menace
#10The reality is that tobacco taxes fund a lot of the government, and there is no replacement for that income source if people stop smoking cigarettes. Thus the tobacco companies are happy to lobby against e-cigarettes to protect their revenue stream and the government is happy to support them because it's their revenue stream too. It's unfortunate, because it's largely a tax on the poor. The rich can afford prescripti…
Why can't people who can't afford cigarettes stop? Is nicotine gum that much more expensive than cigarettes?
Because it's an addiction and by design, very difficult to quit. As for the gum, I can tell you that it's a rather poor replacement for cigarettes. It doesn't really eliminate (and barely curbs) the need for a cigarette.