Taxes on cigarettes are nothing more than a way of picking on the most vulnerable in society.

Smokers tend to be poorer, and in the case of long term smokers, addicted.
So unlike other taxes which are meant to be redistributive from the top down, fag taxes redistribute money from the poor to the State.

Also, in the case of cigarettes, there is no market failure in the form of an externality. Unless you blow the smoke in a young child's face - in that case it's a parenting failure.

So that's my two cents.

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Exactly. It's the idiot tax. Like the lotto. If people are prepared to throw their money away why shouldn't the govt take as much as it can?

Don't give me any waffle about addictiveness. I little bit of willpower never killed anyone as this former idiot tax-payer can attest.

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Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.

It's a poor tax, not an idiot tax.

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When record numbers of cigarettes are being smuggled in each year then yes the tax is too high. Form a purely capitalist point of view of course. I don't believe in any regressive taxes.

There is an externality associated with smoking, hate to be technical but I believe economists like to call it an negative externality of consumption.

The tax on cigarettes is to correct a market failure, where the price of smoking in the absence of a tax does not factor in medical costs associated with smoking.

Society pays for the healthcare of smokers especially so for the poorest who depend on state provision of healthcare.

if the issue of regressivity is of greatest concern, then ban cigarettes, that way the poor arent subject to an unfair burden and the ban would also have a positive externality in benefiting smokers own health while also freeing up government finances to fund other services rather than treating smoking related illnesses.

Its smokers turn this week, is it?

Last week, it was gallery goers.

Who will be the 'most vulnerable' in society next week?

I hope is people with grey hair in their beards. That's me!

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Countries than produce fewer total CO2 emissions than Ireland:

Bangladesh (Pop. 162m)
Ethiopia (Pop. 80m)
Peru (Pop.30m)


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On a quick economic point there are two other major costs associated with smoking apart from the cost of the products themselves (and the associated taxes).

1. Cost of extra medical care. Don't have any concrete figures but statistically there is a very slight chance that smoking won't have any affects. On the flip side, the cost of getting lung cancer is enormous.

2. Life assurance and critical illness policies. Depending on how old you are, which company you are with etc, it can vary. But for a thirty year old man, looking for 200K life assurance and 100K citical illness, it would cost an extra 40 euros a month with some companies. Possibly more with others.

No it has to men with receding hairlines...

The mocking, the finger pointing, the draft across my forehead...........

Bullcr*p. I come from what would generally be called a "modest" (more correctly termed "poor") household and none of my family have ever smoked, apart from my mum, who gave up almost immediately in the 60s when the evidence came out about the health dangers.

It is patronising and condescending to suggest that poorer people are dumb or somehow cannot appreciate the dangers of smoking.

I understand what a negative externality is, I just don't see one here. In reference to "society paying for healthcare", all I see here is government failure, not market failure.

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