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Comment by phoronixrly | Hacker News Reader

How about how much tax money will be gained from having alive and healthy people earning money and paying taxes? I bet it's going to be more than whatever cigarette tax will be lost...

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In New Zealand we tax tobacco heavily. It is thought that smokers save the government money - they pay a lot of tax and die early.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/smokers-save-govt-cash-says-re...

This is true for my country as well. Govt taxes cigarettes around 1000%. I'm not kidding, that's a thousand percent tax. Our govt essentially runs on smokers and drinkers tax money.

Not if the smoking cohort is concentrated in older, retired members of the population.

It's not. Smoking among those over 65 has always been relatively rare. It used to be that the highest rates were among those under 30 but those younger adults today don't want tobacco and the current largest cohort of smokers is middle-aged. Less than 10% of over-65 Americans smoke tobacco according to various surveys.

Look around you, do you see only old sick people smoking? Also at this study (for Spain):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6813084/

> Deaths due to lung cancer represented the 28.90% and the 10.83% of all cancer-related deaths in 2017 in males and females respectively, with an increasing tendency in this last group. In addition, the YPPLL count increased in the study period among females. Lung cancer was responsible annually for 60,846 YPPLL, and productivity losses summed €13.1 billion over the 10 year period.

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