(As a side note here I could suggest the Scottish Government ban cigarettes being sold at such outlets because staff are too busy to deal with age verification. Just as they are doing with cigarette vending machines. Super-expensive tobacco obviously has some special allure for children that adults will never understand, so it's best to ban their sale from such outlets, just to be on the safe side.)
The leading paragraph says:
MAGAZINE shop WH Smith already has a pack of 20 on sale at £9.99 at their Glasgow Airport branch and it is feared the price hike could lead to a surge in the black market as crooks cash in.There is growing awareness that making cigarettes more expensive will drive customers in these hard times into the arms of smugglers. But Sheila Duffy appears to believe that there is no illegal market: all she can say is tobacco won't 'pay its way' against smoking-related costs to society even at that inflated price.
Hiking prices for tobacco reached a point of diminishing returns for the economy a long time ago.
1 comment:
Duffy et als claims that hiking taxes has nothing to do with smuggling is so patently ridiculous that it hardly needs commenting upon.
The "paying its way claim" however is one that the average person really can't evaluate without a fair amount of research, so it's worth trying to get easy-to-grasp but not-generally-known information to people. I *think* I did an effective job of that in my "Taxes, Socials Costs, and the MSA" article at:
http://tinyurl.com/SmokingCosts
and the points made there have been supported even more strongly in the years since it was written. Not only are tobacco taxes now extravagantly higher but there have also been studies that looked fairly at the medical costs for smoking, obesity, and alcohol use and have found that those who smoke, overeat, or drink moderately end up costing the health system LESS in the long run due to the theorized early deaths etc. even if there are NO taxes on the products involved.
One of the loophole arguments that Antismokers use to get around this inconvenient fact is inflated theoretical calculating of "lost productivity" given to the State. They overlook the fact that such a calculation would, if applied properly, make abortions prohibitively expensive: every little zygote owes the state hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of productivity ... all of which is lost in an abortion.
Should such an argument have a real bearing on laws regarding abortion? Of course not... but open the door of such figuring to the controlling zealot personalities out there and all sorts of stuff can roll through.
- MJM
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