SF is considering a new tax on cigarettes:
The proposal, to be introduced next month to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, would add 33 cents to the cost of a pack of cigarettes, to offset the estimated $10.7 million the city spends annually removing discarded butts from gutters, drainpipes and sidewalks.First: how the hell do you estimate the specific cost of removing discarded cigarette butts? I mean really--what is the methodology there? Is it that the city would have to do less street cleaning and other maintenance if there were no cigarette butts? I'm not buying this statistic at all.
Second: why pick on cigarettes? If you can actually isolate the cost of litter that comes from specific products, shouldn't those other products have a "litter tax" as well? For example, should there be a litter tax for soda? How about fucking gum? And if the only reason why cigarettes are different is because there is also a health benefit to taxing them, then that negates the notion that this tax had anything to do with offsetting the costs of litter in the first place.
Bah. I'm not a smoker, and I don't think smoking is a good idea--and I'm even okay with the idea that we should tax tobacco to dissuade people from picking up the habit. But at some point, if you've agreed in principle that smoking tobacco should be legal, you have to afford the users of tobacco some--pardon the phrase--breathing room to legally partake in it without being bludgeoned with exorbitant and capricious taxes.
(Photo by flickr user netan.)
1 comment:
My friend Liz is an auditor for the city and she's told me that you would be shocked at how much money the city spends not just on cleaning up litter, but on analysing it: what's in it, where it goes. So there's probably good info behind those numbers. The most common litter is cigarettes, followed by fast-food wrappers.
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