One other interesting thing that I’ve learned through this research is that the majority of successful quit attempts are unaided, cold-turkey attempts. I found that fascinating. Many interventions for smoking cessation actually have been proven effective, but they are not implemented nearly enough, leaving most people to quit basically “on their own” whenever they just decide they have to quit.
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that’s that will power and discipline reinforcement man. They legitimately retrained their brain to not want to smoke anymore.
That’s how I quit all those years ago…
What’s the length of time y’all consider for people to have quit successfully? Just never smoked again or like 5 yrs?
No, i’m just acting like if you increase the cost of something with a static amount of moneys you see a downward shift in that thing.
I don’t have a particularly vested interest in only looking at lower income earners re: sin tax. If you’d like to believe that increases in prices don’t have meaningful changes on S&D, I’m not really interested in convincing you.
You made your “I look at the micro” comment prior to my story about my uncle.
Nope, he said it was about the price minimum per pack. This number is driven by (in large part) the sin tax. I would have questioned him a great bit if he said “damn that sales tax increase being the only reason my smokes cost more.”
So far you’ve gotten the words of AG who is directly studying this and said .25 cents more equates to .6% less. If our follow up is arguing about defining a “meaningful” decrease, I’m not really all that interested.
My uncle’s cost of living decreased after moving to NY. Prior to moving, he was supporting his disabled son. My cousin passed away and he left the state for work reasons.
So I sound wrong because I’m attributing his less smoking to the sin tax (when I’m yet to argue that it’s SOLELY the sin tax). C’mon man.
Ya, not necessarily.
Hey, man, you’re the one that said it’s doing an awesome job of reducing demand in certain segments of the population. All I want was some proof because I have yet to see that. So far, I still haven’t.
It isn’t so black and white.
Ya, and look where we ended up and N=1 anecdote “proving” your point.
Uhuh, how much does a pack of cigarettes cost before taxes in Ohio V. New York?
Well, I hate to break to your uncle, but the cost is driven more so by the higher sales tax.
Ya, did you not read his replies to myself and polo?
Cool, fingers in ears it is.
Lol, dude, that’s exactly what you’ve been doing for the last 15 posts…
Anyway, sorry to hear about your cousin and I’m out on that note.
I don’t have data driven proof to show you raw numbers. Maybe one day AG will toss them out for us.
My uncle is proof of concept. Not proof of macro change. Proof of macro change, as I’ve already said, I do not have.
Have I ever said anything to the contrary? Sin tax = higher price. Higher price = less demand. If 75% of the higher price is due to the sales tax, you’re still left with a portion that can be attributed to sin tax.
I did, I think a .6% decrease is meaningful.
Alright I’ll take it back. Define meaningful change for me. I’m waiting for your insight that led to you being so condescending. I’m sure it’ll take my breath away.
Depends on substitution availability or if the person/persons are willing to decrease their consumption/demand in some other thing in order to maintain their consumption of the good in question … i.e. an increase in sin tax on cigs may mean some people will forego their kraft mac and cheese for the store brand kind … boom they just made up the difference with relatively little affect on their utility
depends on the scale as alluded to by AG which I agree with … also depends on where they shift their behavior … for instance .6% of 100,000,000 is 600,000 … proportionally it’s peanuts but in real terms that’s a medium sized city.
Now, if half of them just shift their bad habit with a marginally higher tax rate to another bad habit with a marginally lower tax rate are we any better off? Is it meaningful? These things don’t happen in a bubble and consequences, unintended or otherwise, ought to be considered.
Does an example exist in the entirety of human history where the price went up and demand remained flat? Serious question.
Even in this example, we’re better off half the time, right? If your example was 99.9%/.1% we’d still be better off .1% of the time, right?
To me it feels meaningful. Guess that’s the nature of a subjective stat like “meaningful.”
You stated the sin tax does an AWESOME job of pricing certain segments out of the market.
You’re free to move the goal post, but you can’t expect people to just move with it.
I’m not being condescending. You’re the one that stated the sin tax is awesome at doing X don’t get mad that people don’t just buy it hook line and sinker.
Or get mad, whatever. I’m really surprised you of all people have taken such a hard line stance without any proof.
Sorry, .6% is a drop in the bucket. It doesn’t stop 99.4% of smokers from smoking. It’s like the opposite of a condom commercial.
Ex. You make the federal minimum wage of $7.25. You get a .6% raise. You now make $7.29. Not meaningful, sorry.
We’re talking about 200k people potentially out of the 32.5M smoker. You can make that “meaningful” if you apply the feels, but statistically, it’s still less than 1% forcing the remaining 99% to spend more because of a policy change based, again, on the feelz.
Depends on the time line you want to look at … I’d imagine there are examples and if we’re controlling for population growth … Price levels of gas/oil fluctuate rather consistently and demand is one of the most inelastic demands I can think of …You’re talking about economics man, the answer is always “depends” … You’re still not considering the alternatives … do you want to roll in theft into demand?
Also, you need to consider exactly what price is … especially in a relatively free market where the price has the ability to respond to market conditions - all prices do (free of distortions) is signal where resources ought to be allocated.
Depends what you mean by better off? I mean, in this scenario the people didn’t change their behavior free of coercion or influence by the state …
serious question - who’s we? I’m no better or worse off - I don’t smoke. This literally does not affect me on an individual level. Everyone I know who used to smoke quit for other reasons other than a sin tax or the price - they did it for health reasons. But, again, the proportion of people I know who have quit smoking is so small that it’s insignificant to consider in the scope of this argument.
Correct lol.
My example was 100,000,000 but yes - I agree with you lol … I know you meant to quote pfury but here we are I guess 
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Accurately objectively define awesome job and I’ll concede to every point you’ve ever made on every thread both past and future on all of T-nation.
As it stands, you seem REALLY hung up on my usage of the word awesome. Give me an objective definition and I’ll shut up.
I promise I’m not mad. Furthermore, you aren’t capable of upsetting me. This, I can guarantee you 
Population on a planet of 6 billion. You get a .06% increase. You now have 360 MILLION more people. Meaningful, sorry.
Do you have one? Again, serious question. Any time you want is fine by me. Shit, if you want to look at cancer medication 3 months after Chernobyl I’m game.
imo, “Society”
Also you asked “are we better off.” I’m not sure who you were referring to as “we.”
Umm, well, no it’s only 36M and the global population increases by about twice that much every single year.
Not meaningful, sorry.
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I’m happy to hear it because it’s not my goal at all. I only try to irritate Zep.
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Sorry, that’s just “awesome,” not “awesome job.” Semantics checkmate.
Oops. I guess I can’t % today. Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on whether or not increasing the population by 36 million is meaningful.
We seem to have reached agree to disagree territory. Guess I’ll go back to putting my fingers in my ears
Sorry, math is complicated, but this is an incorrect interpretation of what I said above.
That “0.6% decrease” that I cited has two key things that I want you to understand:
- it’s the absolute decrease in the population prevalence. It’s not “0.6% of smokers will stop smoking” - the correct interpretation of the number cited above is that a $0.25 increase per pack in cigarette taxes is associated with a 0.6% absolute reduction in the prevalence of tobacco smoking. For example, if the current population smoking rate in a state is 18.5%, an increase of $0.25 per pack of the tax in that state would be projected to decrease the population smoking prevalence to 17.9% in that state.
You are free to retain your opinion that this is a relatively small change, but I did want to clarify that.
- It’s a model-based estimate, based on 15 years of longitudinal data collected from all 50 states, of what the change in the population smoking prevalence would be in a given state in response to a $0.25 increase per pack in the tax. Why $0,25 per pack? Well, we just needed to pick some meaningful unit that we could all relate to that represented a realistic “change” in what a state could consider if they were trying to project “how much would our smoking rate decrease if we changed taxes by X.” If we had done the calculation per $1 increase, the number would be 2.4%, not 0.6%. So don’t get too wedded to that 0.6% to mean more than it does.
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Does the number truly scale linearly like that or were you just explaining the math scaling?
edit: follow up, if it doesn’t scale linearly, have you guys found a rough best fit on said scaling?
Appreciate the clarification. I’m not really sure how you reduce tobacco use in the portion of the population that doesn’t use tobacco, but I’m sure you explain that to dum dumbs like me in your paper.
Generic State Population: 1,000,000
Smoking Rate (Before Tax Increase): 18.5% =185,000 smokers
Increase in tax by $0.25 per pack
Smoking Rate (After Tax Increase): 17.9% = 179,000 smokers
Smoking rate has decreased from 18.5% to 17.9% = “0.6% absolute reduction”
There are 6,000 fewer smokers than before. However, that doesn’t mean 0.6% of the smokers quit smoking; look at the numbers above again. It means that the net decrease in smoking (taking into account the number of people that started smoking in past year and the number of people that quit smoking in past year) adds up to 6,000 fewer smokers, which is 0.6% less of my hypothetical state’s population that currently smokes.
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We’re working on it, lol.
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