Vaping is about 10 times cheaper than smoking tobacco, and may prove to be far less harmful too.

OPINION: Shameful, smelly, sinful smokers.

Last year, a public health campaign asked young people to "creatively and anonymously condemn" the unclean ones by secretly snapping photos, making fun of them, and sharing it all online. This year's campaign probably involves public floggings.

Distaste for dirty durrie-munchers is what makes the Government's blatant Budget cash-grab such a genius move.

They're whacking the price of ciggies up to $30 a pack by 2020, with much solemn head-shaking about how awful smoking is. It's all for our own good, of course. Nothing to do with the extra $425 million of tax they'll trouser in the next four years alone.

Smokers are an absolute goldmine. They're too puffed to wheeze out a complaint, and who would leap to their defence? Remember, officials literally encouraged our youths to stalk and humiliate them online, and no-one so much as batted an eyelid. Everyone knows smokers are a) gross, and b) cost the health system a bomb.

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As usual, everyone is half-wrong. Gross they may be, but smokers pay three times more tax than they consume. As an added bonus, they're more likely to die young. It's actually the puritan exercise freaks - subsisting on nothing but steamed vegetables and spring water, clinging to life through numerous joint replacements - who cost society a fortune.

For social smokers who like to accompany a pint with a dart or two, all this is mildly frustrating, but not the end of the world. We'll cut back accordingly, and maybe feel better for it too.

Others are not so lucky. The snobs who dictate how the proles should live apparently forget that smoking is incredibly addictive. Lots of people will keep sucking down ciggies on, tax or not. The annual cost of a pack-a-day habit will rise from $7300 to $11,000. For struggling families, that's disastrous. It means less food on the table, an unheated home, or a spiral into debt.

Subsidised patches, lozenges and gum are available. But they've been around for ages, and clearly they haven't helped everyone.

In its infinite wisdom, the Government has made it difficult to get your hands on a new tool that could not only vastly reduce costs, but maybe help you quit too.

In the UK, smokers have been urged to switch to e-cigarettes, which are about 95 per cent less harmful than tobacco. They contain nicotine, but don't have the other 3999-odd chemicals. Some people have also used them to quit, by slowly cutting down the amount of nicotine in the fluid.

The long-term effects of vaping are not yet known, and it's illegal for anyone to physically sell e-cig fluid here in New Zealand.

We do know one thing for sure: E-cigarettes will save you a fortune. You can import the fluid for personal use, with a week's supply costing about $10 to $20. That's an annual cost of about a thousand bucks a year; vastly cheaper than tobacco.

The Government has plumbed the depths of cynicism with this tax hike, but what's done is done. From here on in, it's clear that smoking tobacco will be absolutely ruinous to your finances. To the addicts desperate to quit, best of luck.

If you do need help, be sure to explore every option available to you - with or without the Government's support.

Got a money question you've been struggling with? Want to send a bouquet or a brickbat? Email Budget Buster at meadows182@gmail.com, or hit him up on Twitter at @MeadowsRichard.

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