More Reasons to Quit Smoking: A Good Job and Lower Taxes

Why quit smoking? You know all the usual reasons: your lungs, your heart, your grungy breath (test yours), your shrunken wallet, your family. If those haven't worked, maybe this will: outrage.

Just imagine knowing that if you spend $10 getting healthier, you'll save $160. Guaranteed. And that the more you spend, the bigger your savings. Eventually, you could invest $50, save $737, and be way healthier. You'd be forking over every spare dollar, right?

That's exactly what your state politicians could be doing -- and in most states, exactly what they're not doing. How crazy is that? By the way, put "million" after the $$$ above. Each year, each state could save $737 million on average! That's future jobs money, better-gig-for-you money; infrastructure, cut-the-debt, heal-the-economy money. Big bucks.

Where's it coming from? States got a ginormous windfall in 1998, when big tobacco agreed to pay $206 billion (yep, billion) to them over 25 years. But the average state is wasting it. We YOU Docs have kvetched about this before (Dr. Mike co-wrote a major report on it) but we're even madder. More and more of the money is being diverted from stop-smoking programs proven to slash healthcare expenses, lost productivity, and Medicaid payments -- not to mention the toll smoking takes on smokers' hearts, lungs, brains, and the people who love them. Check out this list of threats to kids who inhale secondhand smoke from their parents.

"Short sighted" is polite talk for this. A new analysis has calculated what's being lost: hundreds of millions. If your politicians will just spend the average recommended amount of $74 million on anti-tobacco efforts, your state will pocket at least 11 times that: from $853 million to more than $1 billion. That would do amazing things for your tax bill and job opportunities.

We want you to blow your stack, too. Find e-mail or Tweet links for your legislators at www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml and light a fire under their butts. We are.

Do you know the best time to quit smoking? Hint: It’s not right now.