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Originally Posted by Usually Lurkin
your increased costs are from the unhealthiness. You are talking about costs related to health, right? How else could someone's smoking bother you? People unhealthy for any reason cost society just the same as people unhealthy for smoking reasons. You could easily argue that drinking costs society more. Some people argue that McDonald's costs us more. I'd say domestic violence costs us more. Why not legalize domestic violence and tax it? Your arguments still do not separate smoking from eating bad.
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"unhealthiness"? I guess you need t better define the term.
the costs were explained well by sluggo up above.
people's "cost to society" due to their decisions vary imo. does drinking cost society more? might, but that substance is heavily taxed too, so the precedent exists.
mcd's isn't necessaily "unhealthy", it's those that abuse it that get unhealthy. too much of most anything is unhealthy imo. if one eats mcd's to much, they can exercise to mitigate the affects. that doesn't work for tobacco.
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Your mumbo-jumbo means nothing to me. I am a simple man, and when you wrote of "profit margins" "how little they pay for the right to pull oil out of the public lands" I interpret that simply as a difference between what someone pays to get something and what they receive when they sell it.
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oh, you're discussing the oil concessions not the private equity? OK.
the oil co. have leases on public lands, and some of those leases are at a few $ a yr. let me repeat that,
a few $ per year.. they should pay a fair price for the ability to make millions of dollars from that right. a fair price, not an exorbinant price. that's pretty easy for even a "simple man".
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if you want to make a fancy-pants argument with more complexity, please make sense.
As for the deal someone struck to get the oil out of the ground, why is it the federal governments job to come along and tax the crap out of one party or the other in order to make that deal line up with what you think is right?
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if you're just a simple man, then everything is "a fancy pants argument", right?
the federal govenment is the steward of the public goods. it IS their job to ensure that the groups provided exclusive right to extract from those public properties pay a fair price for that right. if they are making an abnormal (some would say it's an obscene) profit from paying a ridiculously low amount for that right then it is reasonable to "tax the crap" out of them.
pretty easy concept for anyone, simple person or not...