From the story “Supporters of increasing tax on cigarettes quietly push on“, we get this insightful statistical analysis from the Associated Press:
The “why” goes something like this: Missouri has the third-highest smoking rate in the nation, spends the third-lowest amount on anti-tobacco efforts and charges the third-lowest cigarette tax.
The correlation is no coincidence.
No wonder polisybodies like statistics. Unlike real science, statistics are just like language–they can say whatever you want, and you can deconstruct the meaning of the numbers-as-text to imbue them with whatever liberation (of citizens’ money-as-tax) theory you espouse.
