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.
It should be pointed out that the vast majority of the military are in support career fields, not combat units. Also, the GI Bill absolutely makes it worth it.
Generally speaking, a military career is the best means of advancement in social class for Americans. You’ll easily move up the middle class and likely upper middle class or upper class depending on time served.
Not everyone is willing to be a public servant. Of all the things from Starship Troopers, that is something I liked. I’m a fan of granting a free college education to public servants, military or govt employees after four years of service.
Citizenship isn’t a perk of military service in the United States, you don’t have to be a citizen to serve but you still earn the benefits.
Too bad the movie just glossed over the whole “Anyone can be a citizen, no matter who you are or what you can do physically” so they could make a satire on military fascism instead.
The conversation Rico has with the “anti-recruiter” is the only point you need to show how ridiculously out of context the movie was, it clearly demonstrates not just a lack of nationalism but its opposite. A concerted attempt by the state to stop getting people to sign up because they don’t have the resources or need for the amount of people that want to join.
It was a clear indication that Heinlein understood the dangers of the ever growing military industrial complex, and how a reliance on it economically will result in constant warfare to justify its existence.
No one cares though, they just quote propaganda that wasn’t even in the book (since it doesn’t fit with the book’s theme at all) and pretend that Heinlein was absolutely devoted to the ideas presented in the novel. The dude wrote about so many different kinds of societies that it’s almost impossible to define what his actual beliefs were.
Yeah less than ten percent is combat trained and tasked and only a tenth of them (so 1% of the total) are combat veterans.
Most of the people you’ve thanked for their service probably worked at a job that civilians do everyday like fixing things or doing paperwork. Just in a uniform.
My primary job was a logistics account, but that meant I had to inventory high value items at Forward Operating Bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and I drove in a few convoys, only once anything significant happened.
it’s just big corporations fighting amongst themselves for available manpower and manlives. But still much better as the alternative, which is politicians fighting amongst themselves for manpower etc
The federal minimum age overrides the state. Generally speaking, state laws can be stricter, but not more lenient than federal laws that cover the same subject.
There's no state that allows recreational purchase under 21. Vapes are considered a tobacco product regardless of nicotine content and also require you to be 21.
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