People will Quit smoking = no tax revenue.

Who do you think they will tax next?

non-smokers?

Smokers should get a medal of Honor for all the things they pay for with the smoking Tax.

I Don’t smoke.

I would love a heavy tax on alcohol that served as a strong disincentive to drink out.

—#90

Alcohol already is taxed pretty heavily.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But then what would happen to those kids without health insurance? So they’ve got smokers in a vice. Smoke and we’ll tax you but quit and you’re uncaring. Especially to those kids.

Someone probably already beat me to it, but the reduction in costs for treating smoking-related illnesses likely will far more than offset the cost of providing health coverage under SCHIP. Dubner and Leavitt (F’o’nomix) may be wrong about the $222/pack external-cost of cigarettes, but not by much.

You think dying of lymphoma or a brain tumor or kidney failure from diabetes is cheaper than lung cancer? It ain’t. It’s just more socially acceptable.

Phillygirl: Ever watch someone take fifteen years to die from emphysema? Not pretty, and definitely NOT cheap. I’ve seen it, and I’ve seen people survive, too. e.g:My M-i-L quit smoking in ‘87, when she was 47; was diagnosed with emphysema when she was 54; and was saved in 2/’07, when, at age 66, she received a double lung transplant (usually, recipients get only one, but the second lung available that day wasn’t a match for the other person present that day at Columbia Hospital—lucky she; it increases her chance of survival exponentially).

I love my M-i-L. But her nearly twenty years with emphysema—most likely contracted from her long-time smoking addiction—probably has cost upwards of $600k in treatment and related care (oxygen delivery at $1300/month; steroid nebulizers at approx. $375/monthm etc.) If part of that cost is borne by smokers, so much the better.

Your reduced costs through attrition/lifestyle-induced-onset scenario kinda makes sense in a bar-argument sorta way. But it really doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny. Point is, smokers don’t all die young and NONE die healthy…

No two ways about it. There’s a book I read by Allen Carr called "the easy way to stop smoking" and it helped me in quitting. One of the things he points out is that the gov’t really has little interest in stopping smoking, the taxes on cigarettes and tobacco are merely revenue generating tools.

Some day one of them will be me, because I have COPD from the second hand smoke of my parents when I was a child, compounded by my years as a bartender back when smoking in bars was the norm.
And I used to be "live and let live" about the smoking too. I just didn’t realize at the time that was a one way street, and it wasn’t going my way.

If you’re too poor to buy insurance (as i was for 2 years) or pay all you medical costs out of pocket, you shouldn’t be buying cigs. From that perspective I’m okay with the increase in taxes.

Chuck,

If you quit cold turkey the physical symptoms of withdrawal, for the most part, are over in 72 hours once the nicotine is out of the system. In 3 weeks it’s all mental associations. The brain can repair and go back to normal functioning pretty quickly but the funny thing is once it’s wired to use nicotine it can switch back over to using nicotine pretty quickly which sucks because if you smoke again you are almost back to square one dealing with the withdrawals.

Granted I am using the patch this time, cold turkey just was not going to happen since I need to be able to concentrate while at work.

When I quit the last time (and stayed that way for 3 months) I was pretty much over it within 3 weeks. No real cravings or urges and that was cold turkey.

For those who want to quit I highly recommend the quit smoking site on about.com it’s free and a great resource/support center.

I quit smoking in July after 33 years. (Cigarettes were couldn’t afford it than when I could.

So, if you buy the idea that financial considerations seldom provide behavioral incentives for breaking addictions, this really is just a bald-faced means to capitalize on a habit that’s increasingly limited to a class of people. Far and away, the largest smoking percentage of the population is in the mid-lower and lower income groups. The large percentage of those smokers who are truly addicted will find a way to keep feeding the addiction, undoubtedly at the expense of other items. And, the government will continue to collect the additional revenue from that addiction.

If this really is a tax intended to modify behavior, @CodpieceWatch has it exactly right. We should also be taxing junk food, alcoholic beverages, sodas loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, etc, at equivalent rates. In fact, let’s tax skydiving, motorcycles and cars capable of exceeding survivable speeds while we’re at it, because of the risks involved. Aside from providing "incentives" for people to give up these risky behaviors, the reduction in costs for treatment for diet-related heart disease, automobile and other risk-related injuries and death will surely decrease my health insurance premiums, as well.

Cloaking this in anything other than revenue generation – in any altruistic notion of behavior modification – is just disingenuous. We only impose these types of taxes on a group of people who are unlikely to vote out those who imposed them.

While still cheaper than packs, bulk tobacco is also getting hit hard by this tax.

From what I understand, rolling papers will wet you back about $6 these days.

Cigarettes are the only product on the market that will kill you if you use them correctly.

I’m all for people quitting. I still have to many people I care about with the habit, and I only managed to kick it 18 months or so ago, but as a behavioral incentive I suspect that increasing sin taxes is not going to be a net winner.

Now a lot of the grocery stores don’t sell cigarrettes except in their convenience stores at the gas bars. In all locations that do sell them, cigarrettes are sold only from behind a metal case that doesn’t have any logos or listings of the brands. The thinking must be that if kids don’t know what brands are out there, they won’t smoke. (Ha.)

I had an uncle die from lung cancer, although it’s still under debate if it was caused by smoking or the massive amounts of pollution dumped near his home. Either way, it’s a terrible way to die, and I couldn’t stand the way that some family members (who were former smokers) were constantly preaching about the evils of smoking to him, even up to the end. The man smoked until the day he died, and that was his decision. Smoking is a shitty, dangerous habit, but it’s their choice. As long as I don’t have to smell it, I say leave the smokers alone.

These days Heart disease and sudden, fatal heart attacks are the bigger culprit in smoking related deaths.

I would guess that smoking related deaths are calculated in the same way as obesity related deaths which caused the CDC to change the number from 365,000 to 112,000.

Otherwise, pick a form a suicide that doesn’t involve poisoning the rest of us.

Can you name the people who died due to second hand smoke.