Quote:
Originally Posted by Huginn
My personal view, as per smokes, tax the **** out of it. Let the social costs = tax revenue. This seems like a harsh view and letting the minority ruin it for the rest of society.
These may be old figures so I apologise, I'm writing this on the fly.
Tax revenue from Alcohol is $5.5 billion where social cost is $15.3 billion. Therefore alcohol taxes should be raised by 3x to compensate this.
Tobacco tax revenue is close to $5.43b (from projected figures). The social cost is $31.5 billion and as the majority of the social cost is under the medical costs, medicare costs ~18billion a year. Tobacco taxes should be raised higher than the social cost of 31.5 billion to $35b. This way, smokers actually subsidize medicare.
Although this is nice in theory, it is doubtful that it would happen.
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Nice idea, and I don't want to defend tobacco, but I don't think we can go further down that path. Presently the price of a packet of 'nails' is >80% tax (I think it's closer to 90%). I have it on good authority that this is creating a huge black market for illegally imported tobacco ('chop chop'). Apart from diverting taxes from the gov't to nasty criminal elements the health effects of chop chop are worse. It is not dried and treated properly and so contains nasty fungi etc. So on one hand the gov't loses revenue and on the other the social cost increases.
The obvious reply is to 'crack down' on the illegal stuff but we have all seen how ineffectual the 'war on drugs' has been for the past 40 years. Why would a 'war on tobacco' be more effective? Education and culture are our only hope. It's interesting that there are perhaps 60 people in my academic unit and I know of only two smokers. The numbers in Chemistry and Biological Sciences and similarly low and across campus in general smoking rates are low. Yet the rate is much - quite noticeably - higher amongst the construction workers on campus. Fortunately I think the rate of recruitment of young people to smoking is declining.