1096
Yeah, yeah, yeah...
(lemmy.ca)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
1096 points (99.1% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
25156 readers
3147 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Ah yes. The poorest people are the smokers, let’s just make them more miserable. Sounds about right.
You should work at a place that sells cigarettes for awhile and scope out the customers. I’ve seen people count pennies and cry because they’re hungry but they’d rather not experience the anxiety of nicotine withdrawal.
As a former very poor person and now just regular poor person who used to smoke ikr.
That said, smoking never made me a happier person and at some point we have to do something. Smoking related issues cost the NHS an absolute fortune.
Do I think that corporations and billionaires should pay their fair share so us peasants don’t need to pay at all. Sure do.
Do I think that’ll ever happen. Heck no.
So given that, then we need to do something.
You shouldn’t make assumptions about people!!
You can have a look at some places that implemented the policy you're putting forward to check if it works though, right?
Have a look at Australia & New Zealand. Taxed at around 65-70% respectively with intent to make cigarettes cost prohibitive
A summary of some outcomes following a decade or so of implementation of these policies:
All this while cost of living increases, rate of poverty increases. I mean not all of these things are solely attributable to periodic tobacco excise increases but it hasn't fixed a thing. The government got some more money to blow on some antiquated nuclear submarines to defend our massive island, surrounded by allied nations and thousands of miles from the nearest potential adversary. They'll be ready in about 20 years. Great to see the extra tax dollars at work!
Unless I’m mistaken but correlation isn’t causation. Meaning that an increase in tax revenue from cigarettes around the time some new subs were ordered doesn’t mean that one is paying for the other.
Is it unreasonable to make the assumption that the extra tax revenue in fact goes into public health to combat the effects of smoking on an aging population?
smoking for those abive 15 has dropped from 24% in 1991 to around 11% in 2019
although i will concede that this tax disproportionately impacts lower income people
The current excise policies were implemented around 2010, at which point the global decline was already well underway. As I mentioned originally, there has been no stage following implementation of the respective policies in which the decline in smoking accelerated. It has only slowed since that time, and in Australia is increasing as of 2023.
It's unreasonable to assume that allocations of tax contributed by smokers and tobacco companies is proportionately allocated to areas relevant to the stated intent of the tax policy. That just isn't a thing for really any tax policy in any government - there's no point at which the public health cost of using tobacco nationally is reconciled against the tax income from those products to see if things are evening out. They're entirely separate vectors that are unrelated.
Do you think these are magic words or something? The entire stated intent of the policy is to cause a correlation that is inverse to the one that's been observed since. Nowhere above did I say that tobacco excise causes the problems I mentioned - I responded to someone putting forward the idea that it is a viable solution to those same problems. ~~I have trouble considering your response to be in good faith, since I already disclaimed this in my original comment.~~ I'm sorry, I misread yours. I was just making a joke dude - it's just meant to be an example of how 1. government expenditures are fundamentally disconnected from the tax funding source and 2. the government having an excess in tax funding often doesn't result in them doing anything of significant benefit to anyone with it. Who are the subs meant to to protect us from, Indonesia? Wait, that's right, it was just to piss off our #1 trading partner
Actual quote
So no I don’t believe they’re magic words and I find your quote disingenuous.
Have a nice day and we can end this here. No hard feelings.
Hey I misunderstood you there and corrected my comment. Just in case you didn't see that. I thought you were referring to a correlation of increased tobacco usage not equalling a causation by the excise tax policies, given the sub thing was kinda completely aside from the central point of what I'm saying