8 ms·
Cigarette taxes are powerfully regressive. It's completely true. But when cigarette taxes go up, youth smoking goes down. Reductions in youth smoking mean pe
by hapless 11y ago
Cigarette taxes are powerfully regressive. It's completely true.
But when cigarette taxes go up, youth smoking goes down. Reductions in youth smoking mean permanent, ongoing reductions in overall cigarette consumption, as young people fail to take up the habit.
This is not a controversial assertion. Even priceonomics' cherry-picked sources primarily discuss price inelasticity in adult smokers, who have been addicted for decades.
These taxes are cruel, but necessary. It's a pigouvian tax that literally saves lives.
- rubidium 11y agoWhat to do about this, to make it less cruel and more helpful? As the article says: "To make these taxes more progressive, Farrelly feels that there is “a pretty obvious solution.” He says, “Earmark some of the funds and make sure they are used to support smoking cessation programs that are aimed at low-income smokers.” This is, surprisingly, rarely done."
- jonlucc 11y agoAs I understand it, smoking cessation programs have pretty bad success rates. An old article from JAMA [0] that seems to be one of the canonical papers in the field points out that only 23.6% of people in smoking cessation groups quit successfully. There may have been major advances since then, but I couldn't find new data quickly. [0] http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=381957 http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=381957
- icebraining 11y ago23.6% doesn't sound so bad. How does it compare to people trying to quit without the program?
- themartorana 11y agoThose are a lot of lives saved.
- logfromblammo 11y agoI have heard that a wide variety of addictive behaviors have been successfully treated with psychedelics. Naturally, as most of them are schedule I substances, and thus not widely available for experimentation, sanctioned and reputable research on this matter is rather scarce. The [flawed] studies already in existence suggest that a single dose of LSD is more effective against alcoholism than an entire year of AA meetings. Anec-data from self-experimenters reporting online suggest that ibogaine interrupts the psychological component of heroin addiction and eases the acute physical withdrawal symptoms for several hours. Nicotine addiction seems especially tenacious, to the point where you have to pass the 3 year mark of continuous abstinence before anyone can even be 90% confident that you have quit for good. 90% of freshly resolved quitters relapse, most within 3 months. By those standards, 23.6% is great, but I wonder if that is evaluated at the 3 year mark, or at an earlier time, when the confidence that the person will not relapse is lower.
- adrianN 11y agoYou could take the money from smoking taxes and spend it on things that benefit the poor, like food stamps, free education and healthcare.
- talmand 11y agoYou want local governments to use the easily obtained revenue generated from cigarette taxes to create programs to reduce smoking? Which reduces revenue from cigarette taxes that they can use to fill in the gaps in their budgets? Good luck with that.
- wrsh07 11y agoI think Planet Money talked about how you could just give the taxes back to poor people as a tax refund, and it would still have the same positive effect without being a regressive tax. I don't think it was this article, but it's something like this: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/03/15/174358638/a-surprisingly-uncontroversial-program-that-gives-money-to-poor-people http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/03/15/174358638/a-sur...
- walshemj 11y agoProblem is that you are subsidizing the bad employers which is where we are in the UK. I pay taxes to subsidize the training of NHS Doctors and Nurses not flipping Baristas and other Mc Jobs.
- TelmoMenezes 11y ago> These taxes are cruel, but necessary. It's a pigouvian tax that literally saves lives. And with modern technology it can only get better. For example, why not create an algorithm that scores how healthy your choices at the grocery store are and introduce the appropriate tax in the end? We are also on the verge of being able to monitor everyone's every movement. Why not tax those who don't exercise enough? Imagine how much the average lifespan will increase when people finally give up on outdated notions of personal freedom and irrational choices.
- btown 11y agoIt's worth noting that private insurance is already trying this type of thing, tracking driving habits. If the government doesn't do this, health insurers will.
- TelmoMenezes 11y agoTrue, the future is looking quite dystopic. I am not a pessimist though: as usual, a new generation will come which will reject all this authoritarianism (as it happened before with sexual behavior, for example).
- evanpw 11y agoNot in the United States. Obamacare made most of this type of thing illegal: only geography, age, and tobacco use are allowable variables, and there are caps on the size of the variation in price.
- Ao7bei3s 11y ago> finally give up on outdated notions of personal freedom and irrational choice Apparently the cigarette industries' attempts to associate smoking with personal freedom in advertisements have been successful in your case. I think the health benefits by far outweigh any perceived personal freedom costs. Smoking is damaging but addictive. Too many people want to but don't manage to stop. If higher prices help reduce smoking, I'm for higher prices.
- 11y ago
- xixi77 11y agoActually, the article does talk about the higher price sensitivity of younger smokers: namely, they note that the price sensitivity estimates are based on data collected during periods of low cigarette prices, and that at higher price levels, there seems to be no detectable effect on smoking rates, suggesting low price sensitivity.
- ArkyBeagle 11y agoI think the long-term and short-term tradeoffs are abysmally difficult to compare. Cruelty is bad.
- bobwaycott 11y ago> But when cigarette taxes go up, youth smoking goes down. I might have missed that part, but where's the definitively proven causal link between cigarette tax rate and young people declining to pick up the habit?