The economics of the issue are really amazing...
An eighteen year old putting five dollars per day into a savings account until they are at retirement age is a tidy sum of money... add the power of compounded interest on that money, put it in certificates of deposit, IRAs, mutual funds, etc. and it is better yet...
Tobacco consumption also leads to increased health care costs for everybody else. 75% of Americans will die from either heart disease or cancer... the procedures to combat them are expensive and insurance companies soak the healthy with higher premiums...
The whole argument over tobacco is interesting. Like alcohol, illegal drugs, marijuana, etc., nobody gives a damn as long as it is not their own drug use someone tries to curtail... AND EVERYBODY KNOWS NONE OF IT IS GOOD FOR THEM!
The economics of the issue are really amazing...SFD
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With all due respect here, I'm not entirely sure many people know exactly how much money the states reap from MSA (unconstitutional, see CEI lawsuit) payments and tobacco excise taxes. The Gubmint is more addicted to the Tobacco tax revenues than smokers are to nicotine. Those revenues fund the very entities like ASH, ANR, TFK who are paid professionals. Their goal is to reduce smoking rates to the below 10% goal set forth in the 1993. In addition to onerous taxation one of their means is to reduce the number of places people could smoke by enacting smoking bans in all 50 states. Your personal comfort as non-smokers is of no importance to them. If SHS smelled like roses and cured leukemia, jock itch and male pattern baldness, they would find some other pretense.
Anti smoking is big business. A ban would cost a lot of people a lot of money. More money than it would cost the tobacco companies.
A few years ago, a North Dakota Republican state legislator proposed legislation to ban tobacco sales in the state. Who flew out to speak against the ban? Not the tobacco companies or SheLion, but the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association and other anti-smoking groups.
Stunned?
If you want to know more about this, let me know and I'll be happy to get you the links so we can have an intelligent debate.
If you folks are content to just relive third grade and call smokers "icky, yucky, smelly and poopyfaces" and tell them to go away, that's fine too. It's a free country.
Let me know.
If you folks have a really sincere interest in learning what is going on
Not many huge newspapers in Bismarck, ND so here's what we have on Michael Grosz' bill from 2003 to ban tobacco sales in ND:
here's the AP story:
http://www.data-yard.net/10y/nd-ban.htm
From Reason:
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/100657.html
News from our group:
http://www.forces.org/fparch/011703.htm
an editorial:
The interesting thing are the circumstances of the bill¡¯s failure:
[Rep. Wes] Belter [R-Leonard, chairman of the Finance and Taxation Committee] told the House that committee members were frustrated last week with the testimony from anti-tobacco groups that testified against the tobacco ban, including the North Dakota Medical Association, American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, North Dakota Public Health Association and North Dakota Nurses Association.
What?! That's like the WCTU endorsing Johnnie Walker. These groups are always in favor of raising taxes on tobacco and of banning smoking in public places. But here we have the American Lung Association lobbying against a bill to ban the use of tobacco? Why?
There's no evidence banning tobacco would prevent and reduce tobacco use because no such approach has been implemented, the groups argued.
Ahhhh. Now we see. These groups are skeptical that banning tobacco would reduce its use. Some of these same groups are vocally opposed to lifting the ban on things like marijuana, on the basis that such action would increase use of those drugs. Apparently there's no reason to believe that the same thing would work in reverse, though, and nobody, especially anti-tobacco groups, would want the government to take action based on incomplete or faulty information. But there's more:
The ban also could take away certain funding for these groups for tobacco control programs.
Ah. Well. So the position of the American Lung Association et al. is roughly this: we should not ban tobacco because that would reduce funding for tobacco control programs. It seems to me, though, that banning the sale and use of tobacco is a tobacco-control program. It's just not a tobacco-control program that involves various public health groups receiving funding from the government.
It would be worth remembering this the next time you see any of these groups arguing for higher taxes on tobacco in order to discourage tobacco use and produce positive health results.
THE POINT IS: YOUR OUTRAGE SHOULD BE AIMED AT THE HYPOCRITICAL GOVERNMENT AND HEALTH GROUPS.