Michael Jordan is out for the season. (Hey, every other news outlet in the country is leading with this item, so why should I be different?)
19th century meets 21st; a 44-foot long truss which has rail tracks for a transport platform is to be installed on the International Space Station next week. More ideas for the 21st century: robots delivering drugs in hospitals. I've seen one of these in use locally; it looked pretty clunky, but it might have been first-generation. Speaking of robots, I hope none ever reads this Practical Guide to World Domination (link posted at Jon's house by kd)! The author has obviously been instructed by way too many B-movies. Free software might be out of a B-movie script to Microsoft, but...
In Tennessee yesterday "hundreds" of citizens went to their state legislature offices to lobby for an increase in tobacco taxes; there is a bill in the Hawaii legislature to do the same. Now, I'm a smoker, so you could expect me to oppose this on purely economic grounds, and you'd be partially right (Hawaii's bill calls for a 10-cents per cigarette tax on wholesalers). But often, and with a $330M budget shortfall, certainly in Hawaii's case this year, it's purely a grab for more revenue rather than public health which motivates the lawmakers. Now, "sin taxes" are popular, but at what point do they become counter-productive? Suppose that the tax increases to such a point that the source of the revenue disappears, because all those smokers quit? Will all the legislators then applaud, saying "Great! We have no smokers (drinkers, drivers, etc.) in the state, so everyone is better off!" Or will they have become so addicted to that source of revenue that they will be flummoxed when it dries up, and they have to go back to doing hard work cutting governmental expenses rather than taxing the few? Just a thought.
Posted by Linkmeister at April 3, 2002 03:22 PMten cents per cigarette. yikes. you know, a few years ago they upped the tax on ciggies in cali so that it went from a cheap=o pack being a little over a buck (change you could usually find in your couch) to over three bucks. and i did quit for about a year, because i was poor and paying that much made me mad. i'm still poor, but poor on a larger scale, and i have gone back to smoking -- fancy, five dollar a pack cigarettes.
the economic downside is that those who are addicted and struggling are going to struggle harder. and unfortunately i'd say that smoking is more prevalent among the less well off -- just a personal observation. [sigh] i need to quit, and it's not really about the money.
is this a comment? sheesh!
Posted by: kd at April 3, 2002 06:47 PM"Sin" taxes in the UK are very high too. It costs the best part of £5 for a packet of fags (about $8?). What really pisses me off as a smoker is frequently reading in the press about what a drain smokers/drinkers are on the NHS - smokers fund the NHS!! If we all stopped smoking and drinking tomorrow the country would be bankrupt >:(
Posted by: Shelagh at April 3, 2002 10:28 PM