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Comment by nouveaux | Hacker News Reader

"What someone does in their own house should be up to them"

I agree with this. The problem is that smokers smoke in public spaces. This causes direct problems to me and everyone else who does not smoke. It infringes on my freedom.

Also for whatever reason, cigarette smokers get a pass on littering. It's disgusting. Tax dollars should be raised on cigarettes so we can hire people to clean up after smokers.

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In Texas there are 3 million smokers. The avg smoker smoke 14 cigs per day, which is 255 packs per year. A pack of cigarettes is currently taxed at about $5 in Texas. That 3mil255packs$5 = 3.8 billion in tax revenue.

I doubt we're spending anywhere near that much money on cleaning up cigarettes.

Note* these numbers are wrong.

The actual taxes on a pack of cigarettes in Texas are 2.42. i grabbed the $5 from a proposal.

Your numbers are way off. The average cost is ~ $5.75 of which $1.41 is tax. That's revenues of about a billion per year. Pretty sure we can find a billion dollars in externalities related to smoking.

We're both wrong it's 2.42. you didn't include the federal tax, the $5 was wrong.

We might spend that much if we actually cleaned most of them up.

So maybe we could consider the tax isn't really about cleaning them up, but compensating the rest of us for having to look at them.

For the most part, the places you can legally smoke outdoors should prevent any meaningful amount of second hand and sidestream smoke. Sure, you may smell it, but I honestly don't care if people have to smell scents they don't like occasionally. The littering thing is an odd exemption, but the mass transition from cigarettes to vapes seems to have reduced that problem, significantly.

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