ISLAMABAD:
Experts have urged the government to adopt a high uniform cigarette excise tax to discourage tobacco use and increase revenue collection.
Addressing a report-launching ceremony, experts said that the most effective way to reduce tobacco use is to raise its price through tax increases. They said higher prices discourage the youth from taking up the habit of smoking and encourage current smokers to quit.
“Adopting a uniform specific excise tax of Rs31.2 per pack will lead to over half a million current cigarette smokers to quit and prevent almost 725,000 Pakistani youth from taking up cigarette smoking”, the experts added. They said that reduction in smoking will prevent over 550,000 deaths caused by tobacco use and at the same time the increase in tax would generate over Rs27 billion in revenues.
The report ‘Economics of Tobacco and Tobacco Taxation in Pakistan’ launched by Coalition for Tobacco Control (CTC) presented its recommendation for the government for curbing tobacco use in the country.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 28th, 2014.
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@unbelievable, I would suggest you read an analysis based more upon actual research than on propaganda. If you go to http://bit.ly/SmokingCosts you will find an examination of the various costs of smoking compared to the taxes smokers pay on cigarettes. You'll note two things in that examination: (1) most of it is based upon peer-reviewed research published in such journals as the New England Journal of Medicine, and (2) most of it was based on far, FAR lower tax rates than we have today.
Smokers are actually subsidizing YOUR health costs, "unbelievable." If everyone stopped smoking today you'd see your taxes rising significantly a few years down the line.
On the other hand, those who sicken and kill themselves with alcohol, soft drinks, and fast food pay almost nothing in taxes compared to smokers. If your real concern is equalization of social financial costs then it's those folks you ought to be taking aim at.
MJM@Michael J. McFadden: Ain't rocket science - smoking kills and economic health care costs are enormous. I may agree that you have a right to kill yourself - but I prefer you pay your own way when it comes to the prolonged and often painful death.
Raising taxes on cigarettes will definitely make smoking a status symbol
So, the "experts" of the Coalition for Tobacco Control (CTC) recommends increasing cigarette taxes eh?
Could that have anything at all to do with the CTC funding and the experts' grants probably coming from government money that will be raised by those tax increases?
Can you imagine them coming out and recommending that taxes be DEcreased (perhaps in order to reduce black market unregulated sales to children) when they know that a decrease will reduce their own funding?
The Antismokers in Pakistan play the same sort of self-serving games at the expense of their people that the Antismokers in the US and elsewhere play.
Michael J. McFadden Author of "Dissecting Antismokers' Brains Philadelphia, PA 1910r