BITRE's methodology is based on the so-called "Human capital approach". This method essentially asks how much money would you have earned over the rest of your working life if you hadn't died prematurely. BITRE also include the cost to your employer due to the inconvenience your death caused.Big A.D. said:radiobirdman said:Big A.D. said:Perhaps it does the first couple of times, but meth dumps 500-1000x more dopamine into the brain than it normally has swishing around in there and you can't put a thousand times more of anything through a system not designed to cope with that volume of stuff without permanently affecting the way it functions.
Forty bucks is cheap enough for people to try it and pretty soon the cost simply doesn't matter any more.
You could offer an ice addict as much free alcohol as they want forever and instead they'll pay the $40 to buy the next hit of ice that'll last them a day.
The uncoordinated drunk who stumbles in front of a bus and dies costs society somewhere between $2.8m-$3 million.
That's not to say the meth head doesn't cause a lot of problems for other people as well, but there's a non-zero cost to everyone in having alcoholics rolling about all over the place.
How does a uncoordinated drunk dying cost "society" $2.8-$3 million ?
Please explain
https://bitre.gov.au/publications/2010/files/report_118.pdf
This method may have merit for road crashes but remember that for most alcohol-related problems the cost is actually just to the individual and not really to "society". (Whether or not this calculation is of importance to a given health insurer (including via Medicare) is a separate issue, since it is still a cost to the individual.)
By stating that you making a life choice that increases your risk of "premature death" results in a cost to society is actually saying that the core purpose for you living is so that you can work for the benefit of others. In the extreme, it is saying that you exist for the purpose of the state and that you are a slave to its wishes. If an activity increases the risk to your health it will result in a loss of GDP (and tax revenue). Hence, if the cost of regulating (or banning) that activity is cheaper than the loss of the future GDP, BITRE's methodology would say that it should be regulated (or banned). It removes personal choice and personal risk. It is, by definition, pure socialism.