A TWO-FER
The New York Times trumpets a significant decrease in the number of New Yorkers who smoke:
After a decade of only limited progress, New York City has just recorded an 11 percent decline in the number of adults who smoke, in little more than a year.
…New York City raised its own cigarette tax in mid-2002 from 8 cents a pack to $1.50 a pack, and both state and federal taxes increased as well in recent years, driving the total tax on cigarettes to $3.39 by mid-2002. A brand-name pack now retails for $7 to $8 in the city, too expensive for many poor people or teenagers to afford.
Simple economics but so paternalistic. The poor and teenagers are too stupid to recognize that smoking is bad for them. So, let’s just raise their taxes to “encourage” the proper behavior. The paper then goes off on a little throwaway about the next line of attack on adults:
All this shows how effective vigorous government action can be in breaking a harmful addiction. That makes it all the more frustrating that so many state and local governments — lured by the possibilities of revenue from slot machines, lotteries and casinos — are doing everything they can to make addictive gambling more convenient and irresistible.
Geez! We’re talking about adults here. If people want to gamble (with their own money) that should be entirely within their prerogative. In fact, I think the state monopoly on lotteries is immoral. Anyone should be able to run a numbers game if they want to compete with Powerball.
For the record- I don’t gamble. Not even lotteries or 50-50 for local charities. I’ll give the guy selling the tickets $5, but I won’t buy $5 worth of “chances.” Just a(nother) quirk in my personality, I guess.
3 Responses to “A TWO-FER”
 Comment by Chris O'Donnell May 17th, 2004 at 8:46 am |
And they are having a stroke in VA because they just raised the cigarette tax to 30 cents a pack. However, since the taxpayers generally end up paying for the lung cancer treatment for smokers, I don’t really have any problem with govenment discouraging the behavior. The outright ban in bars bugs me when I’m home thinking about it, but probably wouldn’t bug me at all while I was out enjoying a pint in a smoke free pub. |
 Comment by Rae May 17th, 2004 at 11:19 am |
Here, here, Daryl. I am all the more for having government stop trying to parent adults stuck in infancy. |
 Comment by Zach May 17th, 2004 at 1:27 pm |
I love the leap made in comparing smoking to gambling… I’m not signing up to read the article, but I really wonder what gambling has to do with the rest of the piece… (Other than that the author is opposed to both gambling and smoking…) The author also states that governments are “are doing everything they can to make addictive gambling more convenient and irresistible”… How does addictive gambling differ from regular gambling..? It’s comments like these that make be think it’s only a matter of time before governments declare war on other legal industries the same way that they’ve declared war on the tobacco industry… |