Posted on 12/22/2006 12:20:39 PM PST by Namyak
Scranton’s recent decision to ban smoking in almost all public places — coming on the heels of a similar bans in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — represents one of the biggest culture changes of our times. Such a ban would have been unthinkable 50 years ago, when cigarette commercials dominated the airwaves and glamorous movie stars lit up regularly on the silver screen.
In recent years, 17 states and more than 500 local municipalities have enacted smoking bans. Cigarette sales have dropped 20 percent since 1998, when tobacco companies agreed to pay $248 billion to the states to help cover the costs of treating tobacco-related diseases. Today, about 20 percent of Americans smoke, half the percentage of 40 years ago.
This not only represents an enormous victory toward eradicating America’s most deadly habit, it demonstrates that concerted public and private efforts can change negative social behavior, no matter how deeply ingrained.
That’s heartening for a number of reform movements, including attempts to protect Pennsylvania’s farms and forests from another bad habit —the low-density, drive-everywhere-for-everything lifestyle that has emasculated our cities and decimated our countryside in the last half-century.
Just as the Surgeon General reported in 1964 that smoking was the leading threat to individual health, the 21st Century Environment Commission appointed by Gov. Tom Ridge in 1997, concluded that sprawling development is the No. 1 threat to Pennsylvania’s environmental health.
Sprawl, the Environment Commission said, consumes enormous quantities of farmland, isolates the poor in our cities and towns, creates massive traffic congestion, worsens air and water pollution, and requires exorbitant amounts of tax dollars to build and maintain.
But efforts to curb sprawl have gone nowhere, mostly for the same reason that efforts to curb smoking floundered in the first two decades after the Surgeon General’s report. Despite all the evidence of societal harm, smoking was considered an individual lifestyle decision that people had a right to make in a free country. Health workers concentrated on prodding smokers to “kick the habit” rather than emphasize the enormous economic costs and substantial health risks that smokers were inflicting on everyone else.
It was only when anti-smoking advocates changed tactics — lobbying for smoking bans and higher taxes on cigarettes, suing tobacco companies to pay for the health care costs of smoking, and campaigning about second-hand smoke —that tobacco use plunged.
Cigarettes began to lose their allure when smokers were forced to stand outside their office buildings to take a drag during work breaks.
Just as it once seemed almost impossible to attack smoking when more than half the men in America were doing it, fighting sprawl is a daunting mission when the American dream still revolves around acre housing lots and three-car garages. But as Anatole France said, if 50 million people do a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
When John and Mary buy a new home that can be reached only by car, they are contributing to America’s dependence on foreign oil and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. They are helping squander Pennsylvania’s open space, and they are raising the cost of government by compelling an inefficient network of roads and utility lines. Unfortunately, no one has brought home to them the negative impacts of their decision. Meanwhile, government has been subsidizing such behavior, not penalizing it.
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is a good place to start changing the land-use paradigm.
Last month, a Transportation Commission created by Gov. Ed Rendell reported that an additional $1.7 billion is needed annually to maintain and improve the state’s highways and mass transit systems — about 40 percent more than Pennsylvania currently spends. The Commission recommended raising the extra funding through a combination of higher state fuel and realty-transfer taxes, driver fees, and local taxes.
While improving mass transit fights sprawl, building new highways does the opposite. Instead, PennDOT should expand its Home Towns Streets program that focuses on sidewalks and trails to encourage walking and bicycling as a means of transportation. Additional revenue should be raised by hiking gas taxes to discourage excess driving in the same way that higher cigarette taxes have discouraged smoking.
The Commonwealth Financing Authority, a state agency created two years ago to administer economic development programs, should cut funding for projects on undeveloped land and restrict future loans and grants to projects on recycled land in existing cities, towns and older suburbs.
The state Department of Education should eliminate state funding for sprawling new schools — like the proposed new North Pocono High School — and require school districts to pay the entire $1 billion annual cost of busing students instead of covering half the bill.
And just as former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop prominently campaigned for a smoke-free society, Mr. Rendell should use his bully pulpit to promote sustainable communities — ones that conserve resources, rather than waste them.
Pennsylvanians can be persuaded to adopt healthier lifestyles — but it will take a concerted effort to get their attention and make it fashionable as well as practical to walk instead of drive.
THOMAS HYLTON, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is author of “Save Our Land, Save Our Towns” and host of the public television documentary, “Saving Pennsylvania.”
No, I haven't been to Montana, but I'd like to visit there, by and by.
However, I grew up on Long Island and I've seen the result of "development". It isn't pretty. Especially when you're stuck in traffic and it's taking you hours to travel a distance that you used to go in forty minutes.
You might be surprised how fast that farmland can turn into housing tracts, highways, schools, shopping malls, and prisons.
Have you ever been to Long Island NY?
It's a big city. I expect to see people stacked like gerbils in boxes. Same bunched-up lifestyle that's apparent in Tokyo, Paris and LA proper. Big cities aren't evidence of so-called sprawl.
The Marxist definition of sprawl is normal Americans raising families, working free enterprise and enjoying open spaces on former farms and forestland, both of which exists here in America by the hundreds of millions of acres.
Well, you have a point there, but you're free to move about the entire Country...until the "Movement Gnatzies" ban that. ;)
You do realize that the end-goal of the left is to have us all "concentrated" in cities, in apartments, with no one owning any land and walking to work, school, and stores, right? No cars, just buses or light rail? "And despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage."
This is what's going on in my state. I'll bet you a donut that you have a bunch of loons trying to cage the citizens of your state using "Smart Growth," too. ;)
http://www.stopsmartgrowth.org/
Then outlaw the gay bath houses because many of the AIDS patients don't have insurance; ergo it falls on taxpayers to pay their costs.
Instead of coddling drug addicts and alcoholics, let's just throw them in jail with the dealers.
And let's limit the number of children born out of wedlock. Only one allowed. After that, mommy is thrown into jail (along with daddy), forced sterilizaation and child is put up for adoption. I am close to certain these bad choices cost as much or more to the taxpayer than smoking.
The idea of privately buying forest and farmland to preserve it is an impossible concept to impress on the moldy liberal mind; their real agenda is to see goverment control of all private property - fascism. That's the real agenda behind smarxist growth, new urbanism and all the socialist "isms" they try to force on us.
When I bought my current property, the first action I took was to buy enough property around me so I'd have a bit of leg room.
That's individual action, and the collectivist goosesteppers don't like that.
"You might be surprised how fast that farmland can turn into housing tracts, highways, schools, shopping malls, and prisons."
So what?
You want to be a farmer, go buy a farm. There's millions and millions of acres for sale. Tell you what, let me know when you buy a farm and I'll buy your first chicken. Okay? Hen or rooster. Up to you.
"It's a big city.... Big cities aren't evidence of so-called sprawl."
Long Island isn't a "big city". The NYC Boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens are located on the western end of the Island, the remainder is divided into two counties: Nassau, the smaller of the two, abuts Queens, while Suffolk takes in the eastern portion.
The "development" of once rural Long Island has progressed at an accelerating rate to the point where there is almost nothing left unbuilt, unpaved, and uncrowded.
Homes used to be built on existing roads with their fronts facing the road, now they are built in gated developments and all that is seen from the public road is a line of unadorned rear ends.
I looked at a number of farms,with an eye toward purchasing and farming, but there was residential development encroaching on all of them, and I know what that portends. The newcomers will need schools, and all sorts of municipal services. The result will be increased property taxes that will force all the farmers out.
Hawaiian Lawmakers Irate over Smoking Violation
Hawaii state officials are irate that despite recent passage of the nation’s most severe anti-smoking law, Kilauea volcano continues to erupt. The “Smoke-Free Hawaii Law” went into effect Nov. 16, banning smoking in all public places.
“The smoke from Kilauea is polluting our air,” said Senator Emma Kukubrane (D-Hilo). “Just because it’s so-called natural doesn’t exempt it from our statutes. The law will be enforced.”
The law calls for fines of up to $100 for the first offense, $200 for the second offense, and up to $500 for each additional violation.
Kukubrane says that landowners whose property has smoking lava on it will be liable for the fines. “Each day is a separate offense as far as we’re concerned,” Kukubrane said. “We’ve got zero tolerance for polluters in this state. We’ll fine them into bankruptcy if we have to to ensure our children breathe clean air.”
read more...
http://www.azconservative.org/Semmens1.htm
Everything used to be legal. Then they started making stuff illegal, for our own good of course. Now they're adding to the list. So it goes.
Does the government which collects cigarette taxes also pay the medical costs?
Nope.
Sooner or later, there will be a plague, a war, or a natural disaster that will open it all up again.
Research the Mayan and Aztec empires.
Or, just get in an airplane. Not much evidence of civilization at 35,000 feet.
I'm pretty sure I own firearms that can launch a projectile all the way across Long Island and still go through a Volvo at the end of the trajectory.
Sometimes.
If you listen to a lot of people it's the poor that smoke so I would expect the government would cover a lot of them if that was the case.
Joe-This is still a place for conservatives, isn't it? There seem to be more and more folks here who come across as anything but.
"I looked at a number of farms,with an eye toward purchasing and farming, but there was residential development encroaching on all of them, and I know what that portends..."
Oh, for Pete's sake.
My uncle farms in upstate New York - Finger Lakes region - and his family is doing just fine growing corn. Nobody is "encroaching" on them. In fact, my cousin is an advisor to Dole.
You lay out excuses on why you can't farm - RESIDENTS ARE ENCROACHING ON ALL OF THEM.
You whine like a liberal - all talk, no action.
I suspect you have zero interest in farming, but just want to bitch about "sprawl."
In fact, I think you're associated with the fascist American Planning Association, situating yourself here on FR to disrupt the board.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.