How Cigarettes Tax the Poor

Cigarette taxes are powerfully regressive. It&#x27;s completely true.<p>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.<p>This is not a controversial assertion. Even priceonomics&#x27; cherry-picked sources primarily discuss price inelasticity in adult smokers, who have been addicted for decades.<p>These taxes are cruel, but necessary. It&#x27;s a pigouvian tax that literally <i>saves lives</i>.

Cigarettes, as a product when used as directed will not only harm the individual 100% of the time but will also tax the remaining non smokers. Cigarettes do not cover existential damages such as harm to nonsmokers, litter, garbage and damage to wildlife albeit through fires, avian or sea life.<p>See Myth 3: The Economics of Tobacco at &#x27;The World Bank&#x27; site.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.worldbank.org&#x2F;WBSITE&#x2F;EXTERNAL&#x2F;TOPICS&#x2F;EXTHEALTHNUTRITIONANDPOPULATION&#x2F;EXTETC&#x2F;0,,contentMDK:20365226~menuPK:478891~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:376601,00.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.worldbank.org&#x2F;WBSITE&#x2F;EXTERNAL&#x2F;TOPICS&#x2F;EXTHEALTHNUT...</a>

The lottery taxes the poor in a very similar way. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;metrocosm.com&#x2F;could-the-lottery-be-the-largest-tax&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;metrocosm.com&#x2F;could-the-lottery-be-the-largest-tax&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m not really surprised by this. Starting to smoke and continuing to smoke are bad life choices and indicate a lack of will power and long-term thinking. Yes, cigarettes are incredibly addictive and quitting is hard (I smoked for 6 years when I was a teen and young adult). The same poor life choices and lack of long-term planning also lead to a low-income existence. Not applying yourself in school because you&#x27;d rather &quot;have fun now.&quot; Not attending college. Not eating healthy foods. Not exercising. Smoking cigarettes. The fact that these things are all related shouldn&#x27;t be a mystery or revelation. Poor people smoke more because poor people make bad choices in general.

Sugar and foods with processes carbohydrates strongly correlates to diabetes in children. So where&#x27;s the sugar and process foods taxes? It&#x27;d save lives.

Doesn&#x27;t seem so unjust to me, as long as the government is efficient.<p>It seems to me that taxes are beneficial to poor people, as government spending benefits the poor the most. At least that&#x27;s the theory.<p>Or they can directly redistribute the cigarette tax money to the poor.

Anti-smoking campaigns were offensive and tiring in the 80s. And whoever brought up pigouvian taxation needs a swift slap upside the head.

We have two separate problems:<p>1. Poverty.<p>2. Addiction to a substance and delivery mechanism poisonous to both the user and those around them.<p>Taxes are among the methods to reduce the prevalence of the latter, as well as to capture negative externalities of their sale. No reason to reduce those.<p>Addressing poverty and inequality generally, however, would be a Good Thing.

If revenue from that tax on an individual is exceeded by the increased healthcare costs then it&#x27;s more like an insurance premium.

Of course, and almost no-one cares. Smokers in 2016 are like blacks in 1900: they&#x27;re the pariahs everyone loves to hate. Smoking is banned from buildings; it&#x27;s not even an option in many places to allow it. Smokers are scorned and looked down upon. Historical dramas whitewash smokers out (or make sure that the villains smoke while the heroes don&#x27;t); smoking is literally photoshopped out of historical photos.

Who do people still smoke? It&#x27;s been know to cause cancer for 50+ years and is expensive. It&#x27;s not like the education isn&#x27;t there (I&#x27;ve seen anti-smoking ads on TV for the past 10 years and at the theater before seeing a movie).<p>Just like alcohol, it seems to be people that willingly want to be taxed.<p>I don&#x27;t see it as a problem.

Quite smoking please! Good for your health and wallet

Why is it objectionable to tax the poor?

They get it back in social medicine.

EVERYTHING taxes the poor.

So, not only smoking is not something that people need to do to survive, but people also have an option to roll their own cigarettes to save money. And yet, these authors decided to use a phrase &quot;cigarettes tax&quot;, when &quot;tax&quot; is usually something that you don&#x27;t have a choice whether to spend money on something or not.<p>Medications tax the sick that need them. Cigarettes sure as hell don&#x27;t tax smokers.<p>(And yes, I smoke myself).

&gt; In the United States, and nearly every other country, smoking is more common among the less wealthy and less educated. In the United States, 26.3% of people in poverty smoke compared to 15.2% for the rest of the population. College graduates are almost a third as likely to smoke as those who did not attend college. Because of this difference in smoking prevalence, Americans from the bottom third in household income spend nearly twenty times more on cigarettes as a proportion of their income than those from the top third.<p>What a strange statistic! It&#x27;s conflating the difference in cigarette spend and the difference in the incomes of top and bottom thirds to give us a meaningless number.

They tax the stupid. A lot of people of lower intellect tend to be poorer (not all, obviously).