[jay1313]

It all depends on who you want to believe. Smoking 'cost' estimates have ranged all over the board. Smoking is linked to increased absent days from work, a cost to society although not necessarily a tangible one. Higher health care costs, smokers go to the doctor more and get lung cancer.

On the other side, smokers die earlier, reducing the cost of long term health care. Smokers get cancer, die, and are buried, they do not linger for years in multiple hundreds of dollars a day nursing facilities.

For more non-tangible costs. Smoking wrecks clothes, thus forcing smokers to buy more clothes, helping the economy. Smokers pay huge amount of taxes in cigarette taxes. Although the amount states raise in taxes supposedly do not cover the actual annual cost of smoking. Minnesota and other states have been hard pressed to show that the amount of the tax collected (not to mention to huge settlement received from the tobacco industries) does not cover what the state actually expends in tobacco health related expenses. Since most smokers have health care coverage, private insurance companies are the ones paying the cost, not the state. The states are showing a net profit in the tax collected versus the acutal amount the 'state' actually pays.

What we do know, is that a state smoking ban will cause some small bars to close, whether that is a good thing or not can also be debated. But the argument that a smoking ban will protect workers from 2nd hand smoke is specious at best since the protected workers will be now be unemployed and the state will have to pick up the burden of unemployed people who will also have the psychological issue of being depressed.

So the state loses business tax revenue, cigarette tax revenue, charitable gambling tax revenue, payroll tax revenue, property tax revenue and gains an empty building, healthier unemployed people increasing longer term health care cost and decreased revenue to cover it.

Not to mention the fundamental taking of yet another right of private citizens.