What would happen if Americans stopped smoking?

Why do smokers think that cigarette butts are a license to litter? You think that crap is organic material like a banana peel or something?

 

It's amazing to me how pervasive broken window fallacy and a lack of understanding of opportunity cost are when people talk about economics.

 

That's one of my pet peeves. Especially in the summer drought season when you see highway medians burned out from a smoker tossing a butt from his car.

 

Same here. The occasional run-in with secondhand smoke doesn't bother me, but butts everywhere do. And yet every smoker I know swears they never do it.

 

he said quit smoking, not quit cocaine.

 

I would become way bitchier.

 

We're not keeping those nasty things in our cars.

 

Really?

 

Because the economy (states combined and federal) would likely lose more than $100 billion in tax revenue from the per-pack taxes charged and income taxes the cigarette companies (or their parent companies) pay.
Plus the tens of thousands people involved in the manufacture of cigarettes (from farm employees to the factories where the cigarettes are made to delivery people) would suddenly become unemployed.

 

Broken window fallacy.

All that money that isn't being spent on cigarettes? It'd go to other parts of the economy. 10s of thousands of people would be hired in other fields because all the money that used to get spent on cigarettes can now be spent on something else, and that increases demand across the board.

 

French people would look down their noses at us. Unlike how it is now.