The Government Wants You to Smoke
By Steve Sommers
The entire US Government really wants you to smoke? Well ...maybe not the Department of health and Human Services, but theGovernment as a whole? I gotta tell you, they do pretty well offof tobacco.
On the average, every smoker saves the government twentythousand dollars per head on costs saved. That’s becausecigarette smokers die early and don’t collect so much retirementmoney. You might think they make up for it in added health careexpenses, but that twenty thousand is after those are deducted.
Also, the Government makes a ton off of the taxes they charge toaddicts. When the Clinton administration was trying to achieveuniversal coverage for Americans (like every other civilizednation) one of the ways they wanted to raise money was byincreasing cigarette taxes but they had calculated that if theyraised those taxes too high people would actually start to quitsmoking and the revenue would decrease at that point. There wasa real careful calculation about how high they could go beforethat horrible thing happened. (And America still doesn’t haveuniversal health care and our life span ranks twenty sixth inthe World and forty five million Americans don’t have anycoverage at all).
If you ask me there’s the real secret to saving social security.It’s not private accounts, it’s smoking. Everybody in the U.S.should be required to smoke, the system would become solventagain with everybody dying off and not using up their benefits,plus - and here’s the real beauty of the plan - everyone wouldbe cool. (As we all know from highschool, cool people smoke).Finally, the Government, both state and Federal, has madebillions off of tobacco settlement money which was supposed tobe earmarked to get people to quick smoking and cover medicalcosts related to smoking, but ... not all of it has. At a guess,I’d say not much.
Is it any wonder that the U.S. still pays farmers to grow thisstuff when they make so much off of it
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