Well ... maybe not the Department of health and Human Services, but the Government as a whole, they do pretty well off of tobacco.
On the average, every smoker saves the government twenty thousand dollars per head on costs saved. That's because cigarette smokers die early and don't collect so much retirement money. You might think they make up for it in added health care expenses, but that twenty thousand is after those are deducted.
Also, the Government makes a ton off of the taxes they charge to addicts. When the Clinton administration was trying to achieve universal coverage for Americans (like every other civilized nation) one of the ways they wanted to raise money was by increasing cigarette taxes but they had calculated that if they raised those taxes too high people would actually start to quit smoking and the revenue would decrease at that point. There was a real careful calculation about how high they could go before that horrible thing happened. (And America still doesn't have universal health care and our life span ranks twenty sixth in the World and forty five million Americans don't have any coverage 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 solvent again with everybody dying off and not using up their benefits, plus - and here's the real beauty of the plan - everyone would be cool. (As we all know from highschool, cool people smoke). Finally, the Government, both state and Federal, has made billions off of tobacco settlement money which was supposed to be earmarked to get people to quick smoking and cover medical costs 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 this stuff when they make so much off of it?
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Steve Sommers is the author of Breakfast with the Antichrist. Visit his website at http://www.breakfastwiththeantichrist.com
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"In economic life there is extreme inequality and exploitation. Although colonialism no longer exists openly in the political and economic sphere, still it persists indirectly, and this should not be tolerated... In this respect you should remember that in economic life, we will have to guarantee the minimum requirements of life to one and all... There cannot be any sort of adjustment as far as this point is concerned. The minimum purchasing requirement must be guaranteed to all. Today these fundamental essentialities are not being guaranteed. Rather, people are being guided by deceptive economic ideas like outdated Marxism, which has proven ineffective in practical life and has not been successfully implemented in any corner of the world. Why do people still believe in such a theory, which has never been proved successful? The time has come for people to make a proper assessment of whether they are being misguided or not." |
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"Human beings have still not been able to form a human society, and have still not learned to move with the spirit of a pilgrim. Although many small groups, motivated by self-interest, work together in particular situations, not even a small fraction of their work is done with a broader social motive. By strict definition, shall we have to declare that each small family unit is a society in itself? If going ahead in mutual adjustment only out of narrow self-interest or momentary self-seeking is called society, then in such a society, no provision can be made for the disabled, the diseased or the helpless, because in most cases nobody can benefit from them in any way... in that case there always remains the possibility of some people getting isolated from the collective. All human beings must attach themselves to others by the common bond of love and march forward hand in hand; then only will I proclaim it a society." |