Nanny State is Back . . .

Puffing Big Clouds of Smoke

Nanny state is back, if it ever went away. The former government was turfed out in part because the public had had enough of the government trying to tell us what lightbulbs we could buy and what length of showers we could take. But bureaucrats, whose sole existence is to plan the lives of others, never went away. They just regrouped, and gradually they are, once again, possessing the souls of their new political masters.

The big cause ju jour is (once again) smoking. We know that there is a cabal of hard-core prohibitionists and abolitionists whose long term goal is to outlaw all tobacco use in this country. They have joined forces with the Maori Party which sees tobacco as a tool of Maori suppression and victimisation. All the protagonists are smugly self-righteous. They are acting with the purest of motives (they tell themselves)--for the good of others.

The anti-tobacco bureaucrats in the Ministry of Health have turned to economic and fiscal cost arguments to bolster their case. Once again it is a matter of "never let the facts get in the way of a good story". They have decided that the public health system could be saved $1.9bn per annum if tobacco never existed. One problem: their figures are nothing other than out and out propaganda--lies, damned lies, and statistics! Or, more to the point, they have resorted to smokescreens.

Dr Eric Crampton, a (nonsmoking) senior lecturer in economics at the University of Canterbury has crunched the numbers and concluded that the bureaucrats' figures are pure spin and flub. The numbers are merely "politically convenient", he claims, in a recent opinion piece in Stuff.

The ministry's latest estimate of the cost of smoking has nothing to do with the costs that smokers impose on taxpayers or the costs that could be avoided if smoking were to disappear. Rather, it's a politically convenient number whose promotion has much to do with gaining voter support for anti-tobacco initiatives and nothing to do with real economic costs.

The Ministry of Health has engaged in the most egregious kind of simplistic analysis to produce the figures they want.

Here's how they derived the figure - number reckoning revealed courtesy of an Official Information Act request and extensive correspondence with the ministry.

After sorting the population by age, gender, income, ethnicity and smoking status, they then compared the costs of providing health services to smokers as compared to nonsmokers for each group. The excess costs of the smoking group were tallied up to produce the $1.9b figure.

But there are two very big problems with this way of estimating costs. It's easiest to think of smoking as bringing forward a whole lot of end-of-life costs. Smokers die earlier than nonsmokers. We know that.

And the costs to the health budget of somebody who is dying are rather higher than the costs of somebody who is healthy. But everybody dies sometime and most of us will incur end-of-life costs that will be paid for by the public health system.

Therefore, you have to compare the full life-cycle costs to the public health budget of smokers and non-smokers.

Suppose that a smoker will die at age 65 and a nonsmoker will die at 75. Comparing 65-year-old smokers to 65-year-old nonsmokers and calling the difference the cost of smoking then rather biases upwards the measured costs of smoking. We ought to be comparing the health costs of a smoker dying at age 65 with the health costs of a nonsmoker dying at age 75.

And, perversely, the deadlier cigarettes are, the greater will be this bias. The younger smokers are when they die of smoking-related illnesses, the greater will be the measured cost difference between smokers and non- smokers because a smaller proportion of comparable nonsmokers would be incurring end-of-life costs.

In other words, smokers save the public health system money! And, oh, by the way. We have not begun to factor in the huge costs to the country of longer living non-smoking people who commence receiving New Zealand (taxpayer funded) Superannuation at 65, and continue long into their seventies, eighties and nineties. Far, far cheaper to see people killed off by smoking at 45.  So, if the anti-smoking bureaucrats want to argue fiscal costs to cloak their nannying, beware the double-edge of the sword you hold.

The fiscal higher costs of smoking are rubbish--pure and simple. Crampton concludes:

. . . be as sceptical of numbers coming from the Ministry of Health as you would be of numbers produced by the tobacco industry. Neither is a disinterested party.

So, if the fiscal arguments are bogus, what are we left with? Nannying. Smoking is bad for you. Since you choose to continue, we are going to protect you from yourself by making it more and more expensive to smoke, then eventually, we will ban it all together. For your good. So there!

When smoking was banned in work places and public places, the argument of preventing damage to others was satisfied. Mission accomplished. Third party victimisation, however overstated, was now regulated against. Now to achieve the goal, the game needs to be lifted.  To achieve total abolition of tobacco the  individual will have to be prevented from doing damage to himself. Nannying, pure and simple. But it's a hard fight politically. So, roll out bogus numbers and spurious economic arguments as cloaking devices. The "we-have-a-plan-for-you" bureaucrats are hard at work.

But, no doubt they go home each night feeling so, well, virtuous.

Hat Tip: Kiwiblog