The whole point of this country is if you want to eat garbage, balloon up to 600 pounds and die of a heart attack at 43, you can! You are free to do so. To me, that's beautiful. - Ron Swanson
The person who blows their heart out at 53 probably costs a whole lot less VS what they put into society.
Not nearly as long as they live, sucking up healthcare resources.
"Unhealthy" people like smokers and the obese are more cost-effective, because they're nearly as productive per year and they die before needing the absurdly expensive medical care for old age.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230728192509/https://www.nytim...
And some informed folks have even argued that in modern vehicles airbags are so effective seatbelts could be worsening accident outcomes. (Elon Musk made this point in one of his podcast appearances re: Teslas)
If you want to make this argument, you can at least provide some data on how much some police departments make by collecting seat belt fines, and compare it to other fines and cost of operation. I doubt the seat belt fines are significant enough to warrant this speculation.
The airbag argument is even worse. Modern vehicles go through numerous safety standard tests, including real world experiments where test dummies are put in an actual car crash. If seat belts make the crash worse for the dummy than airbag alone, these tests would have shown it, and there would be publications about it in a peer reviewed science journal. If you are so confident, you should be able to find at least one such publication. I doubt you will.