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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RMF who wrote (132)	1/14/2005 4:53:38 PM
From: Suma	Respond to of 42652

Tobacco Farmers in Boone NC have switched to raising Broccoli. They are doing very well with this. The tobacco that is rasied is for Cigars... Burley I think it is called. It's strange to see all the tobacco drying barns without the golden crop..

To: RMF who wrote (132)	1/14/2005 9:13:34 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Respond to of 42652

But I find it rather ingenuous for the state governments to use smokers as their "pot O' gold" for funding everything. You are undoubtedly the wrong person to say this but "I hate to tell you I told you so, but I told you so!" NOW a situation has been created where it pays state gov't to keep people smoking! It's like state lotteries and Indian casinos: It used to be that gambling was considered a socially destructive vice and it was the duty of gov't to suppress it. NOW gov'ts have their hands in the pockets of the gamblers and the more they prosper, the more money the gov't gets! So the gov't now has an interest in creating gambling addicts! I also find it rather ironic that the government is working like crazy and spending billions to PAY tobacco farmers for their loss of livelihood. And they used (and may still) pay them crop subsidies to grow a weed that kills people. Ain't gov't wonderful? Smokers get screwed coming and going. Cigarette companies get sued so the people THEY addicted have to pay higher prices to pay for those suits. Tobacco farmers GREW the drug that addicted the smokers, yet the smokers have to pay through their taxes so the tobacco farmers won't suffer hard ship. The smokers need to WAKE UP! The addiction is curable. Smokers get treated like TRASH. Their insurance companies won't even cover smoking cessation drugs. Cheap at 1% of the price. Allthe money that cigarette companies got sued for is being paid for by the addicted users of their products, yet almost NONE of that money has EVER gone to help smokers in ANY way. Yup. Most goes to build highways, pay bureaucrats, fund elementary schools, ... D*** little ends up in any effort to cure smokers of their addiction. Or keep people from starting in the first place.