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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (259403)	11/11/2005 5:09:24 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571172

Re: Why do Europeans smoke? They will end up paying for smoker ailments thru the socialist medical system. Well, not being a smoker myself, I may not be the right person to ask about smokers' compulsion.... I guess for most smokers it's a "youth complex": teenagers long to "look adult" and for most kids smoking is but the cheapest way to the trappings of adulthood. After all, we seldom hear of, say, fourty-year-old smokers who started smoking at 35 --chances are, they've been smoking since their twenties, if not their teens.... As for "paying for smoker ailments thru the socialist medical system", we can view the cigarette business as a zero-sum game of sorts. I mean, I think a pack of cigarettes costs about 5.00 euros, out of which 4.00 euros go to the fiscal coffers (sales tax + excise). Hence the government's dilemma: cigarettes, like gasoline, make up a sizable revenue stream... Gus GRUESOME PICS Outright bans aren't the only weapons wielded by politicians. The European Union in October called on governments to put gruesome pictures of cancerous growths and blackened lungs on cigarette packs. Many countries are using tax hikes to suppress sales. Germany added 32 cents a pack in levies in March, 2004, bringing the average price of a pack of smokes to $4.90, and will hike taxes by the same amount in December and then in September, 2005. But higher taxes don't always have the expected results. In France, tax hikes to cover a hole in the social security budget have raised the price of an average pack by 39% over the past two years, to $6.40. That has led to a 30% plunge in cigarette sales, but not an equivalent decline in smoking, as consumers turn to the Internet, cross-border, and black-market sources. [...] businessweek.com