Strangely the smuggling is worst where the tax on tobacco is high.
Surely they couldn’t be connected?
I thought Axel Foley stopped this.
Smuggling Cigarettes from Kentucky (Marlboro $40-45 a carton) to Chicago ($95+ a carton) used to be BIG business. It was even bigger before Kentucky added a big tax. Any given Saturday the number of cars on US 41 with trunkloads of cigs is crazy.
The biker gangs run them out of North Carolina by the truckload, where they are even cheaper.
No longer do they ask you where it hurts first....they ask you if you smoke, have smoked, lived with people who smoked...and then they ask if you own a gun.
I'm so sick of the government telling me what to smoke, what to eat, what to drink, how many hours to sleep, how much exercise to get, to love gays, that climate change is my fault, etc etc
A similar thing happens with beverage containers. Michigan gives a $.10 refund for a beverage container. Take four cases of empty beer cans across from Indiana, come home with a free case of beer compliments of Michigan taxpayers.
Not that I condone illegal activities, but if I still lived back east I might be making good money running smokes into NYC. Again, not I condone such activities.... but a properly loaded vehicle could make somebody good money on a two day trip.
I remember when I was a young man living in CT, making a run to Carolina every now and again.... they have some good fishing down there, and rumor has it that the cigarette taxes were nearly nothing.....I really wouldn’t know....
As far back as the ‘60’s when the tax was nowhere near what it is today one of my neighbors made regular runs to (I think South Carolina) and brought back hundreds of cartons that he resold. As I recall, he did it in his car as he didn’t own a truck.
If it made financial sense for an individual then think of what it means now. Taxes are like prohibition, turning “honest” people into criminals. *Honest, not performing any other criminal acts except not paying absurd taxes on their vices.
Anyone who didn’t see a black market developing is pretty naive, I think.
Need to increase the federal tobacco tax which will reduce the arbitrage between states.