Posted on 04/02/2009 3:47:57 PM PDT by Drango
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — For more than a century, the Sharp family of eastern North Carolina has grown tobacco, nicknamed the "golden leaf" for reasons that went beyond the cured plant's rich color.
`snip
"There's nothing else we're doing that comes even close to yielding the profits that tobacco yields."
For generations, tobacco growers were a protected class, as lawmakers across the South defended the golden leaf as stridently as politicians from Michigan and New York do automakers and Wall Street. It remains a huge business: The tobacco crop in North Carolina alone, where farmers produce nearly half the value of the entire U.S. output, was worth $686 million last year.
But lawmakers don't look out for Big Tobacco as they once did. In 2004, Congress eliminated a tobacco quota and price support system that dated to the Depression. ~snip In Raleigh, where there were spittoons North Carolina General Assembly until the mid-1980s and a smoky haze in the halls until a few years ago, House members voted this week in favor of a limited ban on public smoking. ~snip
It's a blow felt in the sandy soil fields of eastern North Carolina that are just OK for sweet potatoes, cotton, soybeans, but fantastic for tobacco. Production dropped by 27 percent to roughly 645 million pounds in 2005, the year after the quota system came to an end, but has slowly recovered in the past few years, boosted by exports and new marketing tactics.
~snip
Growers are also looking to sell their crop overseas, and a group called the U.S. Tobacco Cooperative that buys tobacco from 3,500 growers in five Southeast states has a unit that exports American leaf to China.
~snip
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
LOL. Sucking on the government teat.
They're also considering a once unthinkable $1 per pack increase in the state tobacco tax
The tobacco wars are over.
North Carolina Democrat Kay Hagan railed against the federal tax increase, ...Then she voted for it anyway,
No comment
Growers say some tobacco buyers are cutting back orders by as much as 25 percent
25%??? Sweeeeeeet.
cigarette sales in the U.S. were already expected to drop 4 percent this year. Industry analysts say the decline could be twice that
Music unto my ears.
I take it you approve of targeted, draconian taxation, designed to alter the legal behavior of citizens?
I believe that is what he is saying. You might as well tax all those that eat apples, ride bikes, eat steak.......or talk like fools on the Senate floor.
And when the evil tobacco barrons are driven out of business the government will go looking for another nipple. I’m giessing you’ll be flopping yours out for them?
I take it you support addicting thousands of teenagers every year?
Reason #983248904239043214739083219381 not to vote Democrat. But sadly some idiot Republicans support this kind of crap too.
Taking away jobs from people to pay for health insurance for other people. Just grand.
I am a smoker, I know I know, I feel like a leper admitting it, but I am, so whatever.
Anywho, this over a dollar a pack difference is at the very LEAST going to slow me down if I don’t go ahead and quit altogether. Now here’s where I don’t get the government’s logic. Yes, it’s all nice to punish the evil smokers and drinkers and tax the hell out of them, but what do you do when you tax them so much that you get ZERO? You can $0.62 a pack tax or you can charge $1.62 a pack tax which in the end will get you NOTHING when they stop buying them.
And then there is the whole cigarette industry and the jobs that come along with it.
I take it you support addicting thousands of teenagers every year?
I do, if those kids want it, they'll get it no matter what.
IBTZ
The same could be said with your food supply. Or your wage. Or what you drive. What your wife looks like -ugh. What someone else’s kids look like. What you can drive and when you can drive it and where you can drive it. When tobacco sales go down the tubes, where will the FED’S go next? Your water you spray on your pristine lawn or the color of your house because it’s not politically correct? How about no black cars in CA because they cause global warming? Back to my first statement. You really do deserve to starve to death soon before you have to pay estate taxes. I’m sure with your comment that you don’t have an estate or anything that looks like one. Grow your own food or barter with your neighbors. I’m sure your neighbors have nothing to do with you. Smart neighbors.
OK...then we differ. I don't believe addicting teenagers is a conservative value.
Why Hell Yeah I support addicting thousands of teenagers every year!! That’s what us evil Republicans do, we like to kill people and stuff. The younger the better!
In the same way I support mowing down thousands of Children with assault weapons, annihilating millions of innocent Iraqis, and trampling the planet with my carbon footprint. I'm going right to Hell don't ya know.
Wow, where do you live? Do they actually hold the teenagers down and get them addicted or tie them up?
Cause where I come from they just throw them in a pit with cigs and lighters and tell them they can’t come out until they are addicted.
But you support Taxation, and that isn't a conservative value either. So what are you?
I support leaving law abiding citizens alone, and to their own devices.
Maybe they should have raised the tax on a gallon of gas by 2200% for non smokers only. We could claim it helps prevent teeangers from becoming addicted to carbon. LOL
At least they are producing something we can EXPORT to China! It’s only a matter of time until the black market takes over the cigarette business here in the US.
China can have ‘em.
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