Let's keep things simple today and talk smoking. Now let's take a moderate 2 pack per day habit and assume that someone doesn't insist on premium cigarettes. So we'll assume $2.25 per pack, I've recently seen premium cigs in a relatively low tax state pushing $5 per pack.
So $2.25*2 per day* 365days per year equals $1642.50 in direct costs per year. If you wanted to get properly anal retentive I could bring in higher health/life insurance costs less increased food consumption. In addition any non-smoker in a modern workplace can speak to smokers taking more break time, which means that the differences in productivity with smoking as the only variable will be noticed when times for promotion or retention decisions are made.
So if you remember that what started this series was that nearly half of Americans couldn't come up with $400 without going into (more) debt. That equals 3 months smoking in our example. So do you want to change your family's socioeconomic status $1642.50 invested for 40 years comes to $425,500.33, wondering why you can't leave anything behind as a legacy for your family it's because you burnt $425,500.33 feeding an addiction.
Or if you want to plan on the world as we know it ending as opposed to it not then $1642.50 will buy:
3179lb of Beans or
2955 rounds of Bullets or
26,332 Bandaids
Each Year!
Of course you are really giving the government about 3/4rs of that money due to taxes. The funny thing is most places are now spending more to collect those taxes than they are getting out of them. They hide it well because the costs to collect are more spread out or shouldered by other entities.
ReplyDeleteFun trivia Cigarette boats got their name because they were developed to smuggle cigarettes across the Mediterranean to bypass post WWII European cigarette taxes, which were pretty confiscatory.
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