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People stopped smoking on planes and bars because of outright bans, not sin taxes. What someone does in their own house should be up to them, and we shouldn’t
by jdavis703 5y ago
People stopped smoking on planes and bars because of outright bans, not sin taxes.
What someone does in their own house should be up to them, and we shouldn’t attempt to use taxes to eliminate vice (but requiring taxes to cover the negative externalities from vice is fine, e.g. funding DUI checkpoints).
- kube-system 5y agoIt is a combination of both. Majority support was needed as a prerequisite to enact bans.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoHow about increased taxpayer funded healthcare costs? Note that, politically, there is no problem collecting higher premiums for tobacco use. But apparently alcohol was not politically unpopular enough to be a factor allowed when pricing an individual’s insurance premiums. Or vaccination status.
- mimikatz 5y agoSubtract it from the lower social security costs
- lotsofpulp 5y agoTo be consistent, I would then also want to get into opting out of end of life healthcare which is where a huge, if not majority, of healthcare spend is.
- conception 5y agoSocial security is not paid by other taxes. It's its own fund.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI do not find that clerical accounts for government expenses matter for practical purposes. Nominally, they can have various funding sources, but a politically popular expense will get its funding from somewhere, somehow. It seems prudent to just treat all monies paid to the federal government as taxes, and all services/products received from the federal government as a whole when accounting for it as an individual taxpayer.
- skeeter2020 5y agokeeping very sick people alive if way more expensive than keeping older people alive.
- lowbloodsugar 5y agoEdit: deleted. Misunderstood authors point.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago> people who take a car when they could take a bus, anyone who makes an unnecessary journey to do something that they benefit from such as church, Some states sort of do this by requiring purchase of personal injury protection (PIP) from the auto insurer.
- jackson1442 5y agoI don't think this is quite the argument you make it out to be, as we already have higher insurance premiums for smokers. Likewise, high-risk people are ineligible for organ transplants. Really, anything can be a slippery slope if we want to look at it through that lens, but it's often not appropriate. This is one of those cases.
- beerandt 5y ago>How about increased taxpayer funded healthcare costs? A known cost of socialized medicine. Unless you want to go down the road of justifying any government coercion or loss of freedom as a taxpayer cost saving measure.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoMy point was that > but requiring taxes to cover the negative externalities from vice is fine, e.g. funding DUI checkpoints). Is not as simple as it may sound.
- rsj_hn 5y agoExcept tobacco use does not increase healthcare costs and in fact reduces them, due to people dying earlier and more quickly.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoPerhaps for the age 65+ risk pool under Medicare (mostly taxpayer funded healthcare), but probably not for the under age 65 risk pools. Or at least I am not aware of tobacco causing significant mortality before age 65.
- rsj_hn 5y agoOverall. This is not hard to verify with some googling -- I posted some links in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29005498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29005498
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nostrademons 5y ago"we shouldn’t attempt to use taxes to eliminate vice" Why not? Taxes are usually preferable to outright bans (which, realistically, is how governments eliminate vice), because they let you decide how much is your vice worth to you and still engage in it, with a revenue benefit to the rest of society, if you really want to.
- xboxnolifes 5y agoBased on the comment, I'm sure OP is also against banning vice. So I'm not sure that reasoning will convince them.
- sushsjsuauahab 5y agoWhat happens when the government decides to tax a particular vice that seems egregious, like maybe taxing vibrators as sexual deviancy? How much is your vibrator worth to you?
- skulk 5y agoThis is not a good argument against vice taxes because there is a clear distinction between activities that are demonstrably self-harming (smoking) and otherwise (using a vibrator). If you want to presuppose a fundamentalist regime, then go ahead, but then are vice taxes really the problem?
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI was under the impression the purpose of vice taxes is due to activities causing societal harm, not self harm. If it was self harm, then seems like we should start with vice taxes for added sugar and not doing cardio workouts.
- skulk 5y agoSufficient self harm at scale is societal harm. > vice taxes for added sugar At face value, this doesn't seem like a bad idea. I've heard about cities in the US that have a tax on large sugary drinks. > not doing cardio workouts It's probably easier to incentivize the good behavior here than punish the absence of it.
- nouveaux 5y ago"What someone does in their own house should be up to them" I agree with this. The problem is that smokers smoke in public spaces. This causes direct problems to me and everyone else who does not smoke. It infringes on my freedom. Also for whatever reason, cigarette smokers get a pass on littering. It's disgusting. Tax dollars should be raised on cigarettes so we can hire people to clean up after smokers.
- standardUser 5y agoFor the most part, the places you can legally smoke outdoors should prevent any meaningful amount of second hand and sidestream smoke. Sure, you may smell it, but I honestly don't care if people have to smell scents they don't like occasionally. The littering thing is an odd exemption, but the mass transition from cigarettes to vapes seems to have reduced that problem, significantly.
- JamesBarney 5y agoIn Texas there are 3 million smokers. The avg smoker smoke 14 cigs per day, which is 255 packs per year. A pack of cigarettes is currently taxed at about $5 in Texas. That 3mil255packs$5 = 3.8 billion in tax revenue. I doubt we're spending anywhere near that much money on cleaning up cigarettes. Note* these numbers are wrong. The actual taxes on a pack of cigarettes in Texas are 2.42. i grabbed the $5 from a proposal.
- skeeter2020 5y agoYour numbers are way off. The average cost is ~ $5.75 of which $1.41 is tax. That's revenues of about a billion per year. Pretty sure we can find a billion dollars in externalities related to smoking.
- JamesBarney 5y agoWe're both wrong it's 2.42. you didn't include the federal tax, the $5 was wrong.
- robbrown451 5y ago
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoThere is no societal cost to high rates of alcoholism/smoking/obesity? I'd argue that we already all pay for one another's bad habits in a very roundabout way.
- i_am_proteus 5y agohttps://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050029 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... >Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoCost increases to whom? Society or the individual? If a person is living longer and healthier then isn't their income and economic contribution higher as well? This does not even mention retirement. This seems like an extremely narrow stat to draw conclusions from.
- i_am_proteus 5y ago>Cost increases to whom? I provided a link to the article so that interested people could read it. It's all laid out quite nicely: health care costs.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tomrod 5y ago> What someone does in their own house should be up to them, and we shouldn’t attempt to use taxes to eliminate vice (but requiring taxes to cover the negative externalities from vice is fine, e.g. funding DUI checkpoints). Heartily disagree. Pigovian taxes are fantastically persuasive.
- clairity 5y agothat’s not a disagreement. pigouvian taxes aren’t used to ban, but to internalize costs, which has a secondary dissuasion effect. it’s a economic solution to a market inefficiency (i.e., a mispricing), not a legal solution to a social vice.
- tomrod 5y ago> a [economic] solution to a social vice Pigovian taxes are an economic solution, as are sin taxes. To the pocketbook there is no difference.
- clairity 5y agono, that’s the whole point. these have very different purposes. pigouvian taxes are meant to internalize externalities. sin taxes are punitive and regressive, which is decidedly uneconomic. you may still support sin taxes, but not on economic grounds.
- tomrod 5y ago> you may still support sin taxes, but not on economic grounds. I do not recognize a distinction. I see that you are citing common critiques of the sin tax relative to the Pigovian tax, but they are substantively and consequentially the same. As a consumer I pay $Price + $Tax for the good, be it due to a taboo good or internalization of cost. Perhaps your concern is on the constraint -- Pigovian taxes are intended to encourage socially optimal consumption, whereas sin taxes are to encourage disuse of the good (which, as it stands, a Pigovian tax is also encouraging for some subset of the consumers on the demand curve). Ergo sin taxes are a subset of Pigovian tax where the legislative body has deemed the optimal social consumption of the taxed good to be zero. Now, _WHY_ the legislative body or society writ large deems said taxed good's total consumption to be zero versus some lower optimal consumption amount the free market cannot attain is a question on where preferences and metapreferences originate, which is a bridge economics is not prepped to cross. But regardless, it fits squarely in the framework of Pigovian tax policy.
- wpietri 5y agoEh. We have to tax something. It seems better to get a given dollar of tax from cigarettes than income. I'll also point out that commercially supplied addictive substances are never only "in their own house", in that the companies engineering and encouraging addiction are going to use profits to go and hook other people. So maybe look at this as a tax on the addictors and a barrier to generating new addicts. Also, do you have data on this? > People stopped smoking on planes and bars because of outright bans, not sin taxes. My dad quit smoking before bans were common, and the (rising) cost was one of his motivations.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jdavis703 5y ago> Also, do you have data on this? My argument wasn’t that people quit smoking all together, but people stopped smoking in public spaces like planes and bars. Sure the occasional person lights up in the airplane bathroom despite the ban, but I think my broader point still stands.
- wpietri 5y agoI see what you're saying. But given that the proportion of smokers has fallen by 2/3rds in the US, I think it's not just about the bans. Indeed, I think what made the bans possible was declines in smoking rates. And those declines were partially driven by increasing tax. Look at California for an example: https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/DataPortal/charts.htm?url=CigTaxSurTaxRev https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/DataPortal/charts.htm?url=CigTaxSur... Note the big jumps in cigarette tax revenue in 1967 and 1988. That 1988 jump is from Prop 99: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_California_Proposition_99 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_California_Proposition_99 Then look at the bottom graph here, showing how CA smoking rates declined quickly from 1988 to 1995 when the indoor ban was put into place: https://tobaccofreeca.com/tobacco-industry/2016-california-tobacco-facts-and-figures/ https://tobaccofreeca.com/tobacco-industry/2016-california-t... Of course, a lot was going on there, including social changes and the use of a lot of that revenue to discourage smoking. But it would seem pretty bizarre to me that the lack of smoking in public places had nothing to do with it becoming significantly more expensive over time. Especially given what a sizable portion of the retail cost of cigarettes was taxes: https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/assets/factsheets/0210.pdf https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/assets/factsheets/0210.pdf
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoPeoples skunk weed habits rarely stick to their own house.
- newbie789 5y agoI only smoke weed in my own home, as do most of my (adult) friends. Are stoners blowing weed smoke into your windows?
- david38 5y agoWe’re not trying to eliminate vice. We’re trying to decrease health care expenses we’re paying and the poisoning of children who live in said homes and have no say in the air they breath.
- rsj_hn 5y agoSmokers, as they die young but not so young as to reduce the labor force, save money rather than cost money. Quite a bit of money, actually[1,2]. People will of course die anyway and treating them of whatever cancer or heart disease they get when they are older also has costs. You can make arguments against smoking (it's not good to die prematurely of lung and heart disease) but these financial arguments aren't valid. [1]https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/smokers-save-govt-cash-says-report/FYUXTPA456UAK3KNA5RFYRL62U/ https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/smokers-save-govt-cash-says-re... [2]https://reason.com/2012/11/21/want-to-save-health-care-costs-then-subs/ https://reason.com/2012/11/21/want-to-save-health-care-costs...
- lotsofpulp 5y agoIn the US, since the costs for risk pool for over 65 and under 65 are allocated separately, unless the tobacco smokers are dying quite a few years before age 65, then they are more costly to members of the risk pool for people under 65. The simple proof of this is that insurers have no obligation to charge tobacco users a higher premium, but all of them do (for under age 65 insurance). If it was true that tobacco users were less costly from age 0 to 65, then insurers would not be charging tobacco users extra since any one could steal customers by offering a lower premium.
- GaryTang 5y agoTo cover negative externalities using taxes unrelated to that negative externality makes zero sense to me.