{"id":2913,"date":"2004-05-17T03:26:43","date_gmt":"2004-05-17T03:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/wp\/?p=2913"},"modified":"2004-05-17T03:26:43","modified_gmt":"2004-05-17T03:26:43","slug":"a-two-fer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/?p=2913","title":{"rendered":"A TWO-FER"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times<\/i> trumpets<\/a> a significant decrease in the number of New Yorkers who smoke:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

…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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 lured by the possibilities of revenue from slot machines, lotteries and casinos \u2014 are doing everything they can to make addictive gambling more convenient and irresistible. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2913"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cobranchi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}