| Check your math. |
Poster: WhosPlayin Posted: 2012/6/23 12:57:05 Guardian A. A****** has his math wrong. Perhaps it is a consequence of posting blog comments from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. Lets start at the beginning - assuming your statistics are correct: 50 million americans * 1.5 packs per day * 365 days per year: 27,375,000,000 (27.4 Billion packs) Taxes at $2.60 per pack * 27,375,000,000: $71,175,000,000 ($71.2 Billion) (In your comment above, you kept reading billions as trillions.) As for comparisons with the Social Security and Medicare budgets, it's a good way to put large numbers into perspective, but I think GAA* got his numbers mixed up. Social Security has a budget for operations of the program, which is probably where the $74.5 billion came from. Payments out of the trust fund that year were $669.7 billion. Medicare is shown in the comment above as $1.2 trillion, but the Federal government's estimate of total healthcare expenses in 2009 was $989.6 Billion - which includes Medicare and Medicaid, as well as other government health programs. So when he tries to make the point that cigarette taxes should be able to fund Medicare entirely, it's not only absurd on its face, but it relies on the incorrect reading of billions as trillions. Medicare was $430.1 Billion, so if ALL of the state and federal cigarette taxes went straight to Medicare (ignoring that some of the taxes are state taxes, and that Medicaid needs funding too) then you would fund about 16.5%. Please don't post any more chain emails like this on the Lewisville Texan Journal. |