Smokin' (definitely not to be pronounced like Jim Carey in the mask)

Near my house there is a plaza/strip mall and beside that there is a retirement home. The retirement home isn't one of those one's where the seniors are being taken care of by people its more just like a community for retired people. They live independently but are far from being rich. They are mostly just average people and I'm sure for the most part they are on a fixed income. Anyway there is one guy who lives there who looks almost exactly like Lee Van Cleef (from the Clint Eastwood "man without a name" westerns). Every time I go to the plaza I see this guy without fail and he is wandering around collecting all the cigarette butts that he can find so that he can smoke them. I always find this mildly depressing. Cigarettes around here cost over $8 a pack (I actually don't know exactly how much they cost they were more than $8 a pack when I quit and that was almost 3 years ago). The majority of that is tax as I'm sure you all know. So I came up with an idea: Cigarette pricing should be on a sliding scale. The younger you are the higher the price and the older you get the more tax is chopped off. Lets say that if you are under 25 cigarettes cost $25 a pack and by the time you are 65 they are $2. I think it would deter a lot of people from starting to smoke because it would be unrealistic for most youths to be able to afford a habit that expensive. But at the same time if you're in your 70s and your still smoking lets face it you should be rewarded for beating the odds.

As usual I'm just talking a bunch of nonsense. This would never work out because trying to implement a sliding scale of pricing would be a sheer nightmare for the millions of retailers out there.