Reply #15: Straight Story, I almost always like your posts...

[MellowDem]

and your logic, except when it comes to smoking threads.

I think there should be taxes on things that impart a cost onto society. For example, gas taxes. We have them, but they are not nearly high enough. What happens when we don't raise money for these extra costs imposed on society, not the companies that produce these goods? Just look at the oil spill. Private costs made public. Which we all know is what smoking does. Smoking is a HUGE public cost that the Tobacco companies don't have to pay in terms of health costs. But they profit off of it.

I agree that other things could be taxed similarly. Like certain unhealthy foods. It is the same thing then. But there is a difference. Food is necessary to live. Smoking isn't. Smoking is chemically addictive. Food isn't. That's the problem with imposing taxes on unhealthy food. That would really hurt the poor who need to eat, which happens to be everyone.

There should be a cost for carbon being paid. There should be a cost for unhealthy food being paid, but that one is a little bit more complicated to enact. Unfortunately, I don't think that that means cigarettes shouldn't be taxed to high hell. They hook people to an extremely addictive, harmful substance that is incredibly costly to their health and to society at large. I do agree that a lot of that money should go to programs helping smokers quit for free, considering they're the ones paying for it. But saying it shouldn't be done because it will hurt the poor who buy cigarettes is like saying Wal-Mart shouldn't be criticized because they help the poor afford more things. In the short term, that may be true. But the big picture shows that allowing these things to continue in the end only hurts the poor the most. Personally, I would like to see some of these taxes be imposed on the corporations who make these products rather than on customers. But as you said, this can conflict with ideas of individualism and "controlling behavior", which happens to be the argument companies used when they want to pass the cost of something on to the customer/society at large.

Personally, I think they could and should tax things like fast food, but they would have to subsidize healthy food and make sure that it is available to everyone, which currently it is not.