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Friday, May 02, 2008 --- 84 days ago http://awearnessblog.com/2008/05/are-cigarette-taxes-becoming-u.php
 For years, states have placed hefty taxes on cigarettes and other "vice" commodities to increase revenue for the state. The logic being that if you insist on smoking, you'll pay for it, and at least others will benefit from your ever-more vilified choice to be a smoker.
And now Massachussetts, New York, and possibly several other states are presently considering a tax hike of $1 per pack , boosting the price of a single pack of cigarettes to more than $8.
This is an astronomic price for something that costs so little to make, but clearly people are willing to pay it. When I was in high school, circa 1990, I remember a friend telling me one day that if cigarettes ever reached $2 per pack, he'd quit. I thought, Yeah, right -- cigarettes will never cost that much. (They were around $1.25 at the time).
Well, they reached $2 by the end of the next year, and my friend kept smoking. I last saw him a few years ago, and he was still as much a chain-smoker as ever, and with 20 years invested in his habit, showed no signs of quitting.
Of course, you can find plenty of statistics to the contrary. When Iowa introduced a tax hike on cigarettes, in March of 2007, that state's cigarette sales dropped by 36% . The theory is that young smokers, or would-be smokers, simply don't start now because they can't afford it.
And maybe this will work, in the long run. But as much as I'm against smoking, I wonder kind of statem ... |
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