Comments on: Obama Raises Taxes on the Poor

By: Sharpshooter

Sharpshooter — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:33:42 +0000

I notice the Indian Reservations are adding most of the taxes to their prices (RYO is $40 off-reservation and $30-35 on the reservations). Evidently they learned a lot from the White Man – use your advantage and pocket the difference.

By: Gene S.

Gene S. — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 02:34:01 +0000

Sorry I missed that one. Thanks for the link.

By: Dave Hitt

Dave Hitt — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:37:38 +0000

Gene,

I covered that a while back, and it generated a lot of comments:

http://www.davehitt.com/blog2/third-hand-smoke/

By: Gene S.

Gene S. — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 03:35:16 +0000

Hi Dave,

I saw this and thought of your discussions about second hand smoke.

http://comics.com/the_grizzwells/2009-03-31/

I played a parody PSA on one of my podcasts about third-hand smoke. How ridiculous is it that someone is actually arguing about the evils of third-hand smoke now?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/03/health/research/03smoke.html?em

Enjoy.

By: Harley

Harley — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:19:13 +0000

Yeah, because it is not like the government never does ANYTHING that is counter-productive or contradicts its own interests…

By: Rufus

Rufus — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:00:01 +0000

Although I have as much of a problem with SCHIP as any other intelligent person (if I lived in the US, I’d be having T-shirts printed with “Support childrens healthcare – smoke more” on them) I’m going to have to play nanny’s advocate a little.
A pound of tobacco is actually quite a lot (it’d see me through about three months of fairly heavy pipe smoking) so having an additional $24 on it probably wouldn’t make that much of a difference over that long.

The one good thing about SCHIP is that it pretty much assures that it’s now in states interest to have enough smokers to pay for it, so it might encourage them to keep the worst antics of the antis in check.

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:23:59 +0000

I gave up smoking years ago because it was getting too expensive to smoke. I do buy Cigars from time to time especially on great American smoke out day.
I also figure that I would make my point by not supporting SCHIP with my taxes in light of the fact that I will eventually end up paying for SCHIP when people either stop smoking or use the black market and they apply that tax on something else.
What I am really amazed at is the complacency of people when products are taxed at many times the actual cost of an item. Too many fall into the trap of “it’s for our own good” and don’t realize that something they like might be next.