But... but...

Plenty of people smoke in LA. It comes with the territory – big city, depressing concrete blight upon the face of the earth, inhabited by “creatives” in the music and show business – so naturally there is smoking. It’s not like we’re in San Francisco, people.

But many factors also weigh in against smoking. One, since this is not a walking city, there really isn’t an appropriate time to smoke (unless you smoke in your car, which is a cool option). Secondly, the hot weather here makes it kind of yucky to smoke, because nothing’s worse than hot smoke down your gullet when there’s hot sweat on your bod. Third, we are still in California, people, ever-progressive and health conscious, and, as we all know, smoking kills you, so that’s a no-no.

Despite all those factors, people were still smoking happily, albeit in back rooms at bars or secretly on their lunch breaks (but be sure to have a mint before going inside if you want that promotion!). Until now. Now they are all smoking unhappily, because of that new tax bill. Cigarettes are now certifiably expensive. Not only that, but the coveted two-for-one deals have all but disappeared!

It makes perfect sense to me to tax people’s vices and addictions. After all, what can they do about it? Quit? So for California to decide to get more money off of people who are essentially paying a fortune for a slow, yet admittedly very cool looking, suicide, well hey that’s just genius. Here are some more things that should be taxed:

-gasoline
-booze
-condoms
-sex between consenting adults
-television
-text messaging
-twitter and / or Wikipedia
-illegal music downloads

How will this new tax affect smokers? How will it affect Los Angeles? Honestly I don’t think it will affect either, in the long run, except to give us more street cred with NYC, since they’ve been paying ten bucks a pack for some time now. The one upside: you’re just that much happier when you run into a free cigarette guy at a bar. Score!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 9:44 pm and is filed under LA Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.