Ah yes. The poorest people are the smokers, let’s just make them more miserable. Sounds about right.
You should work at a place that sells cigarettes for awhile and scope out the customers. I’ve seen people count pennies and cry because they’re hungry but they’d rather not experience the anxiety of nicotine withdrawal.
You can have a look at some places that implemented the policy you’re putting forward to check if it works though, right?
Have a look at Australia & New Zealand. Taxed at around 65-70% respectively with intent to make cigarettes cost prohibitive
A summary of some outcomes following a decade or so of implementation of these policies:
No acceleration in the overall decline of smoking rates at any stage following policy implementation
Reversal of trend in Australia where tobacco use is currently increasing
The disproportionality in smoking rates between Europeans and the countries’ respective indigenous groups is now higher
Politicians (even the health minister himself in Aus) now champion increases to tobacco excise as a means to secure the financial stability of the country
All this while cost of living increases, rate of poverty increases. I mean not all of these things are solely attributable to periodic tobacco excise increases but it hasn’t fixed a thing. The government got some more money to blow on some antiquated nuclear submarines to defend our massive island, surrounded by allied nations and thousands of miles from the nearest potential adversary. They’ll be ready in about 20 years. Great to see the extra tax dollars at work!
Unless I’m mistaken but correlation isn’t causation. Meaning that an increase in tax revenue from cigarettes around the time some new subs were ordered doesn’t mean that one is paying for the other.
Is it unreasonable to make the assumption that the extra tax revenue in fact goes into public health to combat the effects of smoking on an aging population?
The current excise policies were implemented around 2010, at which point the global decline was already well underway. As I mentioned originally, there has been no stage following implementation of the respective policies in which the decline in smoking accelerated. It has only slowed since that time, and in Australia is increasing as of 2023.
It’s unreasonable to assume that allocations of tax contributed by smokers and tobacco companies is proportionately allocated to areas relevant to the stated intent of the tax policy. That just isn’t a thing for really any tax policy in any government - there’s no point at which the public health cost of using tobacco nationally is reconciled against the tax income from those products to see if things are evening out. They’re entirely separate vectors that are unrelated.
correlation isn’t causation
Do you think these are magic words or something? The entire stated intent of the policy is to cause a correlation that is inverse to the one that’s been observed since. Nowhere above did I say that tobacco excise causes the problems I mentioned - I responded to someone putting forward the idea that it is a viable solution to those same problems. I have trouble considering your response to be in good faith, since I already disclaimed this in my original comment. I’m sorry, I misread yours. I was just making a joke dude - it’s just meant to be an example of how 1. government expenditures are fundamentally disconnected from the tax funding source and 2. the government having an excess in tax funding often doesn’t result in them doing anything of significant benefit to anyone with it. Who are the subs meant to to protect us from, Indonesia? Wait, that’s right, it was just to piss off our #1 trading partner
Hey I misunderstood you there and corrected my comment. Just in case you didn’t see that. I thought you were referring to a correlation of increased tobacco usage not equalling a causation by the excise tax policies, given the sub thing was kinda completely aside from the central point of what I’m saying
That is patently false. There is only one single risk factor for cancer generally that is bigger problem than smoking unprocessed tobacco - that is smoking processed tobacco. If you charted endemic cancer risk factors in order of risk, with smoking processed tobacco at the top, then smoking unprocessed/organic/raw tobacco would be about 5% away from the top. The next biggest risk factor would be obesity about halfway down the chart (close to smokeless tobacco products like dip, which has a higher specific risk for mouth cancers). Turns out lighting something on fire and inhaling the combusted free radicals is universally a terrible idea, who’d have thunk? Personally I’m amazed that this kind of misinformation still propagates, on Lemmy of all places, sixty years following the surgeon general’s warning.
Imagine looking at the war on drugs, prohibition in the US, etc then thinking “I think we should ban this drug that’s already normalised and used by millions. Then nobody will use it and everything will be fine.”
It. Doesn’t. Work.
It especially wouldn’t for something as addictive as nicotine and so trivially purchasable abroad and easy to import.
Tobacco is already dying. Just let it continue to run its course.
But does your car suffer from ulcers? And you can mend a flat tire - can you fix Dobbin’s broken leg? And when your car back fires, it makes a loud noise … when Dobbin backfires, he kicks you in the head.
Dobbin is also capable of miscarrying a new Dobbin … when a car dies, it’s less emotionally draining, unless it’s a classic car that’s over 50 years old.
You got me there … a Model T Ford is a bit hard to swallow … but you can keep warm inside your car, or set fire to it. Also Dobbin doesn’t produce a big black tire fire that can used to signal for help from far away.
I saw this type of manifesto on a brand new Yukon the other day in the Hobby Lobby parking lot. It was all cut vinyl lettering, nice contrast of color against the shiny black paint. It was honestly surreal, and could be an untapped market for the folks at Cricut.
You assume they could figure out that you’d be making fun of them. I think they probably lack the critical thinking and self-awareness for it to matter.
I’ve said many times that I can’t get rich off of stuff like this because I have a soul and wouldn’t be able to be ok with parting fools from their money. That might be you, too.
Yup. I could make all sorts of money if I was just willing to have the morals of a disney villan. Scamming people is so easy and theres a lot of ways where you can do it so your victim will even fight tooth and nail to convince everyone else that they aren’t actually being scammed.
If the car is old and rusty enough that’s not entirely wrong. My dad has a truck right now that he’s just driving until the next major breakdown; after that it’s going to the glue factory getting sold off as scrap.
For those who are wondering if this picture is real or not, I couldn’t say. But I have seen a fair share of misspellings and bad grammar written on trucks about similar sentiments in Nevada (seeing where the license in the picture belongs to). The take away of this is that usually there is a correlation between education and conspiracies (believing in misinformation), and it’s a very real, serious issue in this country.
Somebody should let the GOP know so they stop trying to defund education! Surely they wouldn’t want entire generations of people growing up to be ignorant, conspiracy believing assholes with no critical thinking skills!
More specifically, we don’t really teach source analysis in a lot of schools anymore. I’ve run into college students who have no idea of how to discern that a source is bullshit - especially if the site or source looks well-polished and sounds like it knows what it’s talking about. Even a lot of Q people have figured out that the best way to draw people in is to look and sound professional, not just ranting into a camera in your truck cabin - you need a nice backdrop, and probably a polo shirt at minimum.
When Republicans were initially investingating the 2020 election in Georgia, they called in a “forensic imaging specialist” who said that they would be able to determine which ballots were fabricated. I got a lot of flack for questioning the guy’s credentials online, but literally his biggest accomplishment in life was inventing a crappy barcode scanner shaped like a cat, and it was a huge flop.
r/conservative was adamant that this dunce was going to overturn the election in Georgia…
This is what upsets me about that ban. Given the size of the capsule containing the toy, an adult capable of doing it would have been really good at deep throating.
If it makes you feel better the ban isn’t because kids could choke but because people used to hide shit like sawdust filling in food so we banned all non food completely surrounded by food
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