Cedar Hill Prep School

Assertion:Making pennies wastes taxpayer money

Reasoning: It costs the U.S. Mint 1.26 cents to make each 1 cent coin, meaning that taxpayers are losing 0.26 of a cent for each one of the 7.4 billion pennies the Mint produces each year.

Assertion:Making pennies wastes time

Reasoning/ evidence:The U.S. Mint makes an average of 20.27 million pennies per day to produce its 7.4 billion penny annual output. If we just get rid of the penny, the Mint would only have to do half the work! And we're not even counting the time, fuel, expense, and hassle of carting all of those pennies around to the banks, merchants, etc. If we stop making pennies in the first place, we save all this associated time and trouble, too.

Assertion: Rounding-up prices wouldn't matter

Reasoning/evidence: The anti-penny folks rebut the rounding-up argument by pointing out that we wouldn't pay more for each item we buy, only for the total price of what we buy. Even if you shop 2 or 3 times a day, (which most people don't,) and even if the rounding goes against you 2 times out of 3, (which it shouldn't,) we're still only talking about a 3 or 4 cents per day at the most! Most people throw more than 4 cents' worth of pennies into the jar (or trash) each day anyway!

I am completely for cigarettes becoming illegal. There are many reasons to support this.

The cigarette is the deadliest object in the history of human civilization. Cigarettes kill about 6 million people every year. Cigarettes are also defective because they have been engineered to produce a smoke that can be inhaled. Tobacco smoke was rarely inhaled prior to the nineteenth century; it was too harsh, too alkaline.

Cigarette industry is a powerful corrupting force in human civilization. Big tobacco has corrupted science by sponsoring ‘decoy’ or ‘distraction research, but it has also corrupted popular media, insofar as newspapers and magazines dependent on tobacco advertising for revenues have been reluctant to publish critiques of cigarettes.

Cigarettes are also, though, a significant cause of harm to the natural environment. Cigarette manufacturing consumes scarce resources in growing, curing, rolling, flavoring, packaging, transport, advertising and legal defence, but also causes harms from massive pesticide use and deforestation. Many Manhattans of Savannah woodlands are lost every year to obtain the charcoal used for flue curing. Cigarette manufacturing also produces non-trivial greenhouse gas emissions, principally from the fossil fuels used for curing and transport, fires from careless disposal of butts, and increased medical costs from maladies caused by smoking.

Lastly, cigarettes are also very expensive. An average smoker smokes about 2 packs per week, the average price for a pack is 6$. This means that they are probably spending 2000$ on cigarettes only. This is a total waste since it has no good effect on you at all. A cigarette also costs the US over 300 million dollars yearly. 175 million dollars to care for care for adult smokers, and 150 million for premature deaths and second hand smoking deaths. Lastly, non-smokers have to pay taxes because of cigarettes.

Considering all the negative reasons above, we should definitely make cigarettes illegal.