So I hear (as did our own Dan McLaughlin, last week) that New York is the place to go for an exciting and remunerative career in the cigarette-smuggling trade: Last week, The Mackinac Center for Public Policy released a report chronicling the rate of cigarette smuggling in the United States, revealing what retailers in New York have long known: state-to-state smuggling has become a big | Read More »
Economist Paul Samuelson was once asked to explain how sin taxes worked. He offered up the following commentary.
“Sin Taxes” are so called because they are levied on those commodities, such as tobacco and alcohol, which are the objects of widespread disapproval. “Such taxes,” Paul Samuelson says, “are often tolerated because most people–including many cigarette smokers and moderate drinkers–feel that there is something vaguely immoral about tobacco and alcohol. They think these ”sin taxes“ stun two birds with one stone: the state gets revenue, and vice is made more expensive.”
This is absolutely what has not happened in New York since Mein Obama and Gropenfurher Bloomberg have decided they would levy exorbitant sin taxes on tobacco products in New York City. Newsday.com describes the destructively regressive nature of the sin taxes on tobacco below.
Read More »“The problem for the GOP is that it is in danger of fracturing, not because it has moved so far right, but because it refuses to actually practice what it preaches.” Senator Max Baucus of Montana receives campaign donations from the parent company of Phillip Morris. Senator Baucus then puts a provision in the highway transportation bill banning roll your own cigarette operations, a business | Read More »
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