> In the United States, and nearly every other country, smoking is more common among the less wealthy and less educated. In the United States, 26.3% of people i

> In the United States, and nearly every other country, smoking is more common among the less wealthy and less educated. In the United States, 26.3% of people in poverty smoke compared to 15.2% for the rest of the population. College graduates are almost a third as likely to smoke as those who did not attend college. Because of this difference in smoking prevalence, Americans from the bottom third in household income spend nearly twenty times more on cigarettes as a proportion of their income than those from the top third. What a strange statistic! It's conflating the difference in cigarette spend and the difference in the incomes of top and bottom thirds to give us a meaningless number.