Word: habited
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lott wants to reach out to blacks and is not a racist, why has he addressed segregationist groups and mused about his Confederate heroes? "Part of it's just habit," says a Lott confidante. Lott has seen the "segs" as part of his constituency. But he knows now that the cost of winking at them is very high, not so much among blacks as among white moderate voters and among national G.O.P. leaders...
...thought when we try to be too quick, we [turn the ball over],” Delaney-Smith said. “I have to credit Wagner’s scrappy defense. I think we have a bad habit of getting sloppy with the ball and relaxing...
...entirely by the smoker, such as increased rates of lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease, are often borne by society as publicly funded medical costs. This is an example of what economists call a negative consumption externality; the smoker doesn’t pay the entire cost of his habit because he might not cover his increased medical expenses through higher private insurance premiums. The classic solution to this negative externality is to impose a tax that erases the difference between the private cost to the smoker and the social cost to society of his smoking; a tax like this...
Unfortunately, it is doubtful that governments could accurately measure the magnitude of the tax necessary for smokers to exactly internalize the excess social cost of their habit. The debate within the economics profession on smoking’s health externality is far from settled. Besides, even if governments could accurately calculate the cost of the externality, they would almost certainly decide to increase the magnitude of the tax hike to deter smoking through punishing smokers rather than relating the tax’s magnitude to the externality cost. New York City’s decision to raise taxes by almost...
Smoking is an unhealthy habit, and it is certainly in the interest of the government to make people aware of its long-term consequences. However, the paternalistic attitude implicit in the cigarette tax ought to make governments wary of imposing drastic increases in cigarette taxes, or any sin tax for that matter. In the event more local governments, including Boston’s, decide to raise cigarette taxes, they should guide their decision not by attempting to punish smokers, but by reasonable estimates of what will internalize the negative consumption externality of smoking...