The NZ Herald has editorialised in favour of a substantial tax increase on tobacco products.
I agree with them.
The NZ Herald has editorialised in favour of a substantial tax increase on tobacco products.
I agree with them.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Tax, health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I don’t, I think it’s a kick in the b***s to all those addicts on lower incomes. For some people it’s their only vice and it’s a destressor. It’s also cruel to come off it. This is coming from a non smoker who doesn’t particularly enjoy second hand smoke.
Options as a result would seem to be:
Quit
Grow your own
Buy on the black market
?
Ah
At the moment, smoking costs the economy more than $1.6 billion a year, of which $1.5 billion is spent on healthcare. A little more than $1 billion is taken by the Government from smokers in excise tax and GST.
Unjust for taxpayers, surely.
http://www.ahw.org.nz/resources/Fact%20Sheet/Info%20Sheet%20Alcohol%20and%20Tax%20Final%2009.pdf
2008 estimated cost of harmful alcohol use: $NZD5.3 Billion
2008 alcohol tax take: $NZD907 Million
Even if these figures aren’t 100% accurate, although I have no reason to think otherwise, then why are smokers demonised so much? Leave out the fact that smokers don’t commit horrific acts of violence and stupidity the more cigarettes they consume in one sitting, the figures just don’t add up.
Is it just an easy target?
See it already almost pays for itself. So heavy handed.
Argh don’t mention alcohol.
It already costs too much to drink it in a civilised way 
I think tax is the wrong way to go about getting people to quit. People are entitled to make up their own minds about what they put into their bodies.
They can make up their own minds when I don’t pay for their health care Spud. Tax ‘em till they have to stop. In my mind smoking ciggarettes is as bad as if not worse than somking weed so why isn’t it illegal already. The reason alcohol isn’t targeted is because everyone drinks. A huge majority of people binge compared to a small number of people who smoke a pack a day….. Solving a major cultural issue in NZ society is a lot harder than stoping a minority from smoking. We all know that no one wants to make the hard decisions…….
Smoking has absolutely no benefits whatsoever, even in small amounts its well established as a carcinogen.
No ones demonising the smokers Nathan ( back so soon after your 2 months away at the beach – lucky for some ) its the cigarettes.
Two months at the beach????? Ermm… got me confused with someone else ghost, possibly Millsy? Different person altogether! I’ve worked up til Xmas, just started back… hang on, why am I justifying myself to you?!! lol
Is there any research to suggest higher tax affects the rates of smoking cigarettes/tobacco?
It seems to me to be a measure targeted only at those who smoke already in order to cope with the costs of their addiction. Let’s be frank – chemically nicotine is as addictive, if not more addictive, than heroin and cocaine and given this I can hardly see how simply raising taxation would have any affect in reducing the rate of smoking. Given that those who smoke generally occupy a lower socio-economic level, it would seem that those who can least afford to smoke and the ones most likely to do it. Again, I fail to see how raising the tax on tobacco will have any positive effect here – in fact I only see yet more fiscal pressure. As much as economists would like us to think that the additional expense would be an incentive to quit I really cannot imagine that this can overcome the simple scientific facts of the drug, and those who are already unable to afford to smoke may be forced to cut other areas of their expenditure in order to keep up a certain level of intake.
However, as stated, I’ve not seen any specific data detailing the relationship, but in my opinion if we are serious about making New Zealanders healthier we’d be taking far more aggressive actions against tobacco and the companies that peddle the evil, vile, and down right disgusting trash that it is.
2 months away at the beach???
Please don’t try and beat obscene language ban Trevor
Apologies, its was Richard who walked off in a huff to the ‘beach’ for 2 months
I think Sam may be right. I don’t know what the evidence says, but your feel for it I think is about right. Smokers, generally, will be in higher proportions in the more at risk demographics of society. Smokers I think are more likely to be over represented as proportions of poorer households and in Maori, Pacific and Asian house holds.
Making something illegal doesn’t make it go away, it just makes it harder to address.
Today – fewer people take up smoking, more people are attempting to quit and it is harder to endure the habit of smoking. Taxing it, I think, will impact a nominal proportion – as a start-stop smoker, there is a price point at which I would make a decision it is not only unhealthy and somewhat anti-scoial, but also uneconomic for the perceived benefit I obtain from it – but I think I am a minority in that regard.
There are others who I fear would take a less rational approach to it. For them, price is not a barrier and education can be ignored and for them the solutions aren’t easy.
So, at what point do we consider alternatives and what are they?
I have always thought that a) you could introduce a vendor licensing scheme that is expensive and vendors b) may only be allowed a certain volume in stock. Knowing vendors don’t make a lot of money from it anyway, why not choke supply without making it illegal by giving vendors the option to sell but in a licensed environment like liquor? Debate either way but something that we haven’t yet tried…
It goes with out saying that all sin taxes should abolished. Sin taxes are akin to a preist making money off his followers sins. Once again Labour is showing how deeply conservative a party it is. It is just more self-righteous moralising from a paternalistic party that’s lost all pretense to enlightment liberalist values.
and I thought you supported user pays QtR
By all means Trevor figure out a way for smokers who actually get ill as a result of their smoking pay for their healthcare if that’s what you want, but don’t punish all smokers in a way which like spud notes attack those on low incomes – just like Labour’s major assault on the working class with GST.
Not prepared to wait and charge when they are ill and poor, but want the full cost to their health and others that they poison built into the charge for their cigarettes.
Every smoker who costs the healthcare system $100,000 by dying of cancer, is a smoker who’s not going to cost $500,000 for long-term care later in life. There’s already a demographic time-bomb for the health service in this country, caused by the aging population.
Ah, here it is: http://www.nzmj.com/journal/118-1208/1251/
We should be thanking smokers, not blaming them.
Just for you Trevor South Park on smoking. Guess who Rob Reiner reminds me of….
Weed, cigarettes, and alcohol. It is interesting how we treat the three differently.
Weed: illegal, but more so the more you have. There are fines for being caught, but doesn’t even compare with how much revenue one would obtain from excise taxes if it were legal. The cost of getting revenue from a banned substance is much higher (police) relatively speaking than a taxed substance (IRD). For one thing, people giving money to IRD do so mostly on a voluntary basis. That cuts down enforcement costs dramatically.
Cigarettes: there is a piecemeal system of banning it, ranging from banning smoking in pubs and most other establishments, but this is coupled with the ability to buy it with a high excise. The one area where a real ban would be welcome is at hospitals. Anyone visiting Dunedin hospital will notice all the people smoking just outside the front entrance. The smoke rises up and enters patients’ rooms. And smoker patients go back to their shared rooms, and the smoke smell coming off of them can be smelled by their roommates. That can’t be good. Smoke causes cancer.
Alcohol: high excise, but a different set of restrictions. One breaks the law being drunk in public, but you can suck down all the smoke you want walking down the street. Alcohol causes cirrhosis as well as cancer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_cancer
Sweets/carbs: let’s not forget that becoming overweight increases the risk of cancer. Perhaps we need some excise taxes on the things that make us obese. On the other hand,
there is the obesity survival paradox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity#Obesity_survival_paradox
So a few glasses of wine a week are good for you, and apparently there can be benefits from being obese. Wine and chocolates, anyone?
Mmmmm I’ll have wine and chocolates
Let’s not rule out all fun. But the hospital thing is disgraceful, right outside the entrance. The council should ban smoking right outside it’s not fair to the patients.
I don’t think people should keep upping the taxes on the fun things in life though. Most people are not going to want to lead a completely goody two shoes life. Let giving up smoking be a choice. I’m glad smoking was banned from bars and restaurants, especially for the sake of non smoking bar tenders.
I was thinking as I was drinking in a bar this afternoon that poor hard core smokers who refuse to give up may be more likely to get sick if they stop buying essential food items to pay for their smokes.
Taxes on alcohol are too high now
R.I.P fun
BTW interesting about the obesity thing.
Spud, you could say that about heroin addicts too. Their choice of expensive drug over food does have health effects, and of course other crime to come up with cash.
That bad choice comes from the addiction, not the public policy. You also have to think about all those people who say they will quit if it goes up another dollar a pack…and then do. There is a balance, of course, between the public policy of discouraging smoking and the revenue side. Has anyone done that analysis here?
Revenue lost through raising the excise tax (from people quitting) over 30 years
+
Revenue saved over that 30 years (in discounted dollars) in the health system from those people quitting
=
?
I know this calculation has been done.
There are lots of dangerous activities one could slap a tax on. Skydiving. White river rafting. Scuba diving. Even riding a bike on our roads can be quite dangerous. Driving drunk. Getting in drunken brawls.
If one becomes paralysed doing any of those things, it means a big taxpayer hit, not to mention the personal suffering. Taxing those things is like imposing a mandatory insurance.
An excise tax on tobacco is a health system surcharge for unsafe activity.
Driving drunk is illegal and there are consequences for that, pity people still do it.
I still don’t think taxes should be put up on cigarettes, I still think it should be personal choice, smokers already pay an awful lot in taxes anyway. It is an addiction so it’s not an easy thing for them to give up.
I’m glad that we live in a world where people skydive and even those people who have those winged cape things and free fall off cliffs.
You are correct in what you say, it’s just not my preferred option.
One can only recommend that smokers buy their tobacco on the black market. I believe their is a good trade in it one that has been greatly increasing in recent times. And smokers could support NZ entrepreneurs and buy NZ grown at the same time and not from multinational cigarette companies. Go black – the black market!
I’m with you!!!
What people want are (1) A home (2) A voice (3) A living wage. What they get are contant attempts to remodel them in accordance with the latest middleclass fetish, using punitive measures, “for their own good.” If you read WHO statistics you will see a number of countries where people smoke more than NZers, and yet have better health and longer life expectancies, perhaps because in those countries the three needs listed above are taken seriously (Japan and France are two such countries that spring to mind). The modern fixation with smoking smacks of cheap nineteenth century style paternalism: “we must stop them from drinking gin and from keeping their coal in the bath.”