Health experts say axing plan to block sales of tobacco products to next generation will cost thousands of lives
Tobacco tax revenue is the best example of accepting a price on lives lost
I hate when articles say “will cost X number of lives”. No it won’t. It will cut them short, it will costs years off people’s lives. Unless it’s sterilized people it won’t cost lives.
A person may die at 40 instead of 80 but that is still a life.
You could say this about anything though. A serial killer isn’t taking lives, merely shortening them. Suicide isn’t ending a life it’s just shortening one. Literally all death can be seen as merely the shortening of an otherwise longer life, which makes your distinction pointless.
Yes it’s less extreme language. It’s doesn’t manipulate emotions as much, that’s the point.
How is the language extreme? For something to “cost lives” means exactly for those lives to be cut short, there is no other meaningful definition. The language used is exactly as extreme as the scenario it describes, by definition.
Do you apply your same logic to other scenarios too? Like would rather that “the tsunami cost the lives of 55 people” be reworded as “the tsunami shortened the lives of 55 people”?
If something is $20 and I buy it with $100 bill, doesn’t mean it cost me $100.
Now something like the zika virus which sterilized men several years ago dud cost lives. Lives that may of been made but can no longer.
That is the difference. Each death from smoking or a tsunami or a mass murderer costed years of potential life but didnt cost the whole life.
I think where the difference lies is that you are interpreting “cost X lives” to mean “cost X lifetimes of Human experience” while the interpretation I, and articles use is more like “cost X people their status of being alive”
That is not what costing something means. Cost is to lose something which you have, it does not mean to lose the potential to something you don’t have. If an apple costs a dollar, it means you had that dollar, and now you don’t. The impact of the apple was for the number of dollars you have to decrease by one. If you buy it with 100 dollars it obviously doesn’t cost 100 dollars because you get 99 dollars back.
When talking about lives, we don’t get them back. People have lives, and if something causes them to lose them, it means costs them a life.
If I own a car, then after ten years of owning and driving it, I trade it to buy something else, that thing still cost me a car. The amount of car I have does not decrease over time but through use. It’s quality might, but the count does not care about quality. Same with life. People who are middle-aged do not only have half a life, they are still fully alive.
You bring up a good point, what does it actually mean? If eight people have their lives shortened by a decade, is that one life lost or eight?
To make it more complicated does every decade matter the same? Does your twenty’s when you are out partying matter as much as your thirty/forties when you are most profitable for your capitalist overloads? What about your nineties when you are frail of health but hopefully surrounded by loved ones?
None, they all had lives.
And then they lost them
Smoking and vaping is a fantastic ‘red flag’ to warn of the otherwise potentially unobserved fuckwititis that many people suffer from.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
New Zealand’s new government will scrap the country’s world-leading law to ban smoking for future generations to help pay for tax cuts – a move that public health officials believe will cost thousands of lives and be “catastrophic” for Māori communities.
National has had to find new ways to fund its tax plan, after its coalition partner, New Zealand First, rejected a proposal to let foreign buyers back into the property market.
“Coming back to those extra sources of revenue and other savings areas that will help us to fund the tax reduction, we have to remember that the changes to the smoke-free legislation had a significant impact on the Government books – with about $1bn there.”
But public health experts have expressed shock at the policy reversal, saying it could cost up to 5,000 lives a year, and be particularly detrimental to Māori, who have higher smoking rates.
Te Morenga highlighted recent modelling that showed the regulations would save $1.3bn in health system costs over the next 20 years, if fully implemented, and would reduce mortality rates by 22% for women, and 9% for men.
“This move suggests a disregard for the voices of the communities most affected by tobacco harm – favouring economic interests,” said chief executive Jason Alexander.
The original article contains 601 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
