The Third Estate will not pay sin taxes! How to avoid the smoking tax.
The Third Estate resisting the smoking tax
As many of you know, this website takes its name from the social structure of pre-revolutionary France. Back then, the Clergy and Nobility were respectively known as the First and Second Estates, while the commoners were known as the Third Estate. One of the major grievances of the original Third Estate was its unjust fiscal position: Nobles were, by law, exempt from tax. As such the burden of financing the regime’s war-like foreign policy, its placemen, and its opulent palaces fell heavily on the commoners.
In much the same way I, and several other members of the modern Third Estate – thethirdestate.net – toil under the burden of fiscal injustice. As smokers we are subjected to a heavy tax that raises £7b – far more than the cost of smoking to the NHS – and which is extremely regressive. And so it was out of principle as well as self -nterest that on my recent holiday to Germany, I took advantage of the country’s far more reasonabletax on smoking, bringing back a good kilo and a half. This is legal within the EU, as long as the tobacco is for personal consumption (which it was).
And I would like to encourage others to do the same. Why should smokers continue to pay an unfair tax that targets a primarily low income minority? Why should we subsidize a non-smoking Britain that appears to despise us?
If like me you believe that incomes – and not lifestyles – should be taxed, then there are in fact a number of ways to cheaply and conveniently resist the smoking tax. My flights to and from Germany cost £49, while I saved about £165 on a kilo and a half of tobacco. Yet savings are attenuated when you consider the costs of getting to and from airports. Meanwhile anything involving international flights can be a bit of a time-consuming shlep. The good old coach and ferry to Calais is still good if you want to buy booze, though recent hikes in the French tobacco tax seriously limit savings for smokers. Probably your best bet is Begium, where you can get 50g of Golden Virginia for just under £4 (compared with around £12 back in England). And due to the Eurostar it is extremely convenient- especially if you live in London. Its just over 2 hours to the centre of brussels and 2 hours back meaning you could make a nice day trip of it. And if you book a few weeks in advance you should be able to do it for around £70, leaving you with net savings of around £170 on 1.5 kilos of tobacco.
Let’s not fund the cut in corporation tax by paying a sin tax. To Europe we go.
Reader Comments
And there I was thinking you were a Europhobe…
europhobe shmeurophobe, business is business
Reuben: At some point, could you actually outline where and why and how strongly you prioratize personal liberties over other conciderations. You regularly give specific examples, but I’ve never seen you give your entire system.
Also, as there are at least two Mikes commenting on this blog, and the other ones sometimes say things I disagree with, I am henceforth Micke.
Hi Mike,
that’s a good suggestion and one that actually necessitates a bit of thinking on my part, so yes I will but it might take me a little time.
Given that other mike is the newbie surely the onus should be on him to change:)
I’m pretty sure there are others. Possibly you have been identifying them all as me. In any case, I’ve been using Micke on and off for years.
Stipulating, for the sake of this discussion, that the tax on smoking is a sin tax, and not, say, a luxury tax, I still have a couple of questions:
1) Getting rid of a tax is fine, but where’s the money going to be raised to pay for it?
2) Pragmatic considerations: not everyone can afford to go overseas to buy their tobacco in bulk. This favours the wealthier, South-East based smoker hugely – if the tax take from smokers drops, they’ll put the taxes up, and those who can’t avoid them – the poorest – will end up paying the tax share for those who can – the wealthier smokers. Nice thinking there.
Reuben I will take you up on your belief in ‘taxing incomes not lifestyles’, there is a fairly compelling counter-argument wherey the tax system could be used to factor in the environmental cost of certain behaviours. A sustainable future for all is probably worth such a curb in liberties. Such plans usually tend to highlight the friction that remains between environmental and working-class agendas.
“A sustainable future for all is probably worth such a curb in liberties. ”
That holds equally true for, say, government sanctioned murder. It’s not a path you want to go down, unless you have some clear way of distinguishing between acceptable infringements on liberty and unacceptable ones that will stop a slow erosion. I don’t see a policeman in custody for the on-camera murder of Raoul Moat, because we’ve slowly allowed our police to become more brutal – but now they’re killing people with long-range cattle-prods, for [random fluctuation in the space-time continuum]‘s sake.
Similarly, we’ll start with the idea that it’s ok for the government to infringe slightly on my liberty in the cause of telling me how to live my life ‘for the greater good’. A couple of chapters later, we’re in a pseudo-fascist/communist totalitarian dystopia.
Benjamin Franklin’s maxim regarding essential liberties and temporary freedoms has become a hoary old cliche, but that’s because it’s regularly used in respect of totally inessential liberties. What liberty, though, what personal freedom, could be more essential than the right to live my life as I wish, and accept the death the comes in consequence, free from interference by anyone, government or no?
If you think your universal healthcare system requires that government interference, then I say that sadly makes universal healthcare untenable. Fortunately, I believe no such thing: it makes universal healthcare more expensive, because we have to pay for the fat, the smokers, the generally unhealthy, and those who have no concern for their cost to the public purse – but that’s a price worth paying.
While I accept your argument you havn’t addressed mine which deals specifically with using the tax system as a tool to factor in the environmental costs of carbon intensive activities. It’s certainly never going to be popular to ask people to consume less but If one accepts the conclusions of climate change and the dramatic implications that such climatic warming will have on our way of life, the lives of those in the global south and for other species can you still make a moral argument to continue to live your life as you wish, completely unshackled from the fundamental limitations of a finite planet?
Sorry, I completely misunderstood you in that case – I thought you were using ‘environmental cost’ in the sense of the costs to the NHS and so-on, rather than in the literal global-ecology sense. I take it you were drawing a more general point than about tobacco smoking alone, though, since the amount of CO2 output from cigarettes is completely negligible.
Fortunately, the first few paragraphs of my response still hold true: If there’s anything that could be worse than man-made catastrophic climate change, it’s letting politicians try and fix it
That’s not really the point, though, because this is a more general issue than just climate change. We certainly have done things in the past for global reasons – the ban on CFCs is a prime example. I note there, though, that we didn’t *tax* CFCs. Generalising again, I’d prefer that taxes were used for raising money, and only raising money. If you want to control behaviour, that should be done through education and legislation.
I guess – and these are ideal types – it might be useful to think of taxes in bipartite rather than tripartite terms. We can have:
Taxes on incomes. Here the idea is that public services need to be paid for and the burden should reflect the ability to pay.
Taxes on negative externalities. These include environemntal taxes which force people to pay for the effect of their activity on third parties or society at large.
Lifestyle taxes – taxes aimed at preventing lifestyle choices regarded as intrinsically bad – over and above their affects on third parties.
A certain level of smoking tax could be seen as internalising a negative externality. However, as £7b it primarily represents a lifestyle tax.