Reply #165: amazing [View All]

[William Z. Foster]

You went to a lot of work here. You are more motivated to criticize smoking than I am to criticize regressive taxes. That is the problem right there, and proves my point.

You say that I am throwing red herrings around. Let's inspect some of the fish you dragged in with your net.

I didn't defend smoking, nor deny that it is "bad." Nor did I "conveniently try to dismiss" that, as you claim. I said "give it a rest" because it is not something we disagree about, and is also not the topic of the thread.

I didn't say that smoking, nor taxes on tobacco, were partisan. I said that regressive taxes were.

I didn't say that people should be able to impose their smoking on others.

I didn't say that the food/obesity debate had anything to do with the debate about tobacco taxes, nor that the two were the same. I asked under what other circumstances you would be willing to impose a regressive tax - on bad eating habit for example? Food may be mandatory, but bad eating habits are not so comparing the two is not "apples and oranges."

I did not make a "two wrongs make a right" argument.

You ridicule the "pay people to quit bad things" suggestion out of hand. Yet national public policy does that for wealthy people all the time - tax breaks or other incentives for "doing the right thing," for example, a popular idea among Democrats.