Ban the $1.8 trillion banners

It's bad enough having MPs wanting to ban, regulate and tax everything except themselves. Now the nurses are getting in on the act. They want to ban people enjoying life, they want us live long and miserably. The longer people live, the more health care they need, so the more employment will exist for nurses. So the nurses are wrapping themselves in a cloud of righteous morality and telling us that there must be a total ban on smoking. They conjour up images of genocide being caused by second hand smoking and society drowning under a sea of smoking diseases.

Hobbes declared that life was nasty, short and brutish. Give the nurses a chance and they will make it even worse: nasty long and brutish.

The favourite study quoted comes, inevitably, from California: land of the intolerant liberal. Professor Leonard Millar of the University of California at Berkely claims that the cost of dealing with smoking will be $1.8 trillion over the next 25 years.

Count Kostov's refined nose starts twitching at the mention of any "cost of..." calculation.

The bullshit calculation is totally one sided: it ignores any of the benefits. This is how companies in the dot.bomb era conned the public: they would declare profits based on revenues before costs. Anyone can succeed with a one sided equation. England can even beat Australia at cricket if we only count England's score.

The calculation stinks so bad the Count is having to hold his nose while writing this.

Let's look at the benefits of smoking for a bit:
a) smokers pay lots of tax to us non-smokers, thank you very much
b) smokers have the grace to die early: so they will not leech the pensions systems. Their clogged up arteries mean a few months clogging up the health care system before they shuffle off their clogs: that's much cheaper than clogging up the health system for decades as the non-smokers are likely to do.
c) some people actually enjoy smoking

And this ignores the $400 billion deal that US states did with tobacco companies to deal with their cost of smoking. It also ignores the billions that various get-lucky litigants hope to con off the tobacco companies by complaining that they were victims of smoking, not just victims of their own folly.

Both Duke University and France's Institue of Political Science reckon that smokers reduce the tax burden for the rest of us.

So the $1.8 trillion cost to society might as well be a $1.8 trillion benefit to society. Perhaps the states should be thinking of paying the tobacco companies for saving them money.

There is good news in all of this. The cost of calculations by all these professors are even worse than the baboon's bollocks. And if producing so much meadow mayonnaise makes you into a professor, then all of us can call ourselves professors. At least, we are unlikely to produce more rubbish than the so-called university professors produce.

So do not call me Count. Call me Professor Count. Or is it Count Professor?