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Mike's Minute: We need to tax the smokers even harder

Author
Mike Hosking,
Publish Date
Fri, 16 Mar 2018, 8:41AM

Mike's Minute: We need to tax the smokers even harder

Author
Mike Hosking,
Publish Date
Fri, 16 Mar 2018, 8:41AM

To cap off a busy week for the fags the government has announced another of its now famous reviews, this time into the tobacco tax.

New Zealand wants to be tobacco free by 2025, and here's the problem - we're running out of time. Part of the reason we haven't been more effective is driven by hypociracy.

READ MORE: 
Health professor: Take tobacco out of dairies

The government earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year in tax from fag sales and they are loathe to give it up of course.

If we are to go smoke free in seven years, and that's all it is now, tax is your mechanism of traction. 

Simply price them out of the market.

But given it's the government that's doing it, where do they find the hundreds of millions of dollars in  tax to fill that gap?

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