So says Heartland’s pro-smoking index page — and that’s just the ones they’re willing to admit to.
In Perth (population 1.4 million) that would be 140,000 people HL admit would die if all smoked. Since about 1/4 actually do, that’s a mere 35,000 people (call it a medium-sized town) from Perth are going to die from their smoking, to say nothing about others they take with them.
OK, so a typical Aussie smoker admits to a pack a day and in real life inhales two. Call it $20 a day, or $7000 a year for a 10% acknowledged risk of dying slowly and painfully (and almost certainly in hospital).
Does this sound like a good thing?
If you last 40 years before croaking, that’s about $280,000.00 spent — what else could you buy with over a quarter of a million dollars of your own instead of giving it to millionaires? — and how much interest would that earn you a year? 5%, from a boring CBA savings account? That’s about $14,000 a year. Much more than the Dole, every year, of your own, for free. From one source: simply not smoking.
Remember that these are the pro-smoking site’s numbers.
How do you reckon a smoker on ~$9000 a year (typical AU dole) copes with spending three quarters of it on something which does them no good and from which only the damage lasts?
Said site complains about smoking bans... yet why should anyone be forced to smoke by constant exposure to an addict or several’s ash and chemical waste which said bans are enacted to combat?
They also massively underplay the real medical costs of smoking — to both smokers and innocent bystanders — in order to look better wailing about “unfair” smoking taxes.
They don’t mention that smoking rates plummet with real and/or educational wealth. The background message hint the want to avoid is: “if you want to be broke and have no brains, smoking is a sure-fire [hah!] way of getting there”.
If HL’s logic is this loose and shonky with such plain and obvious data, how talented do you reckon they get with more esoteric values? Such as companies (or whole countries) effectively being forced through subservience to trade-restricting monopolists?
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