At $13 a pack, that is $4,725 per year for a pack a day smoker. A part time job just to fund smoking. Glad I never started that habit.
A carton/week for 30 years, I finally quit cold turkey in 2015, --the year that more Americans quit smoking than ever before.
Americans are dropping the habit of cigarettes at record paces. Look around. You hardly ever see people smoking in public anymore. It wasn't long ago that you could always find a few people puffing away outside restaurants and storefront entrances. These days I rarely see this.
The decades-long campaign to ostracize smokers has worked. I'd imagine the rate of smoking among college-educated professionals is practically zero. Today, smoking is almost entirely a habit relegated to the poor and blue collar working class. And these are the people shouldering the burden of the $13 pack of cigarettes needed to fund the various programs that have come to depend on tobacco taxes.