Posted on 10/14/2013 10:32:10 AM PDT by nickcarraway
teachers union pensions
In sum, the article does not tell us where the “cigarette money” went.
Wisconsin Democrats blew ours on hookers and booze...and three TV Ads.
Think I’m lyin?
Gubmint entitlements are the most widely used addictive product in the world.
This guy is a genius. Less nicotine in cigarettes. So is you cut the amount in half, people will smoke twice as many!!!! That’s a real game changer genius!
OH how i hate those commerical’s
I once had a relative give me a small cash horde as a gift. A year later, I asked myself the same thing.
Most of it went to buy gold, silver, and bullets.
Then much of it went to pay college tuition.
I bought some beer with what was left.
I think I still have $100 of it.
LMBO!!
Most of the money went to the trial lawyers who then kicked back to the Democrat party in the form of "campaign donations".
The rest went into various poitical slush funds.
I thought everybody understood this at the time of the settlements?
IIRC, the law firm for the state of Florida tobacco case pocketed a cool $1 Billion!
http://www.uky.edu/CommInfoStudies/IRJCI/tobaccoreport.htm
“The $206 million invested so far in Kentucky agriculture has helped shake farmers’ historic allegiance to tobacco, encouraged diversification and upgraded the state’s cattle industry, the largest in the Eastern U.S.”
“Not only did the money provide incentives, each of the county-level programs – diversification, storage, fencing, forage, cattle handling, cattle genetics and on-farm water supplies – require farmers who get matching grants or forgivable loans to take training in the subject. Rogers said the programs are helping about 12,000 farmers per year.”
Where did all that cigarette money go? All those fat cat lawyers and politicians . . . . mmmmmm . . . wait a minute . . . those are the same one and the same.
As we speak... sales of Ecigs and vaporizers are skyrocketing - I would guess in 1 year the sales of tobacco alternatives are going to drop "cigarette" taxes to the point where the whiners will want to further ratchet up the taxes. That will further push smokers to ECig/vaporizer where they get their nicotine juice from on-line chemists who are not paying "cig" taxes.
Collapse of a large number of liberal entitlements. Works for me.
I don’t know how old you are or if you are a veteran, so you may or may not remember this. About 1972 or ‘73, some Vietnam vets in WA started to ask questions about war bonuses for WA war vets. Going back to earlier wars, the state had always paid a bonus to those who had seen combat, paid for with a special cigarette tax. When this came up, Olynpia claimed there was no money available to pay such a bonus. A little bit of digging turned up the inconvenient fact that the state had continued to collect that tax over the years, long after all eligible vets had been paid. Oops!! Checks for $200 were soon in the mail.
Much like the Spanish-American War telephone tax that was finally repealed in 2006, it goes to show that once a tax is enacted, it’s nearly impossible to get rid of. Once people forget about it, the money just gets diverted into somebody else’s pet project. So it is with the lottery, which, as we all know, is nothing more than a tax on the mathematically-challenged.
Yep, spent most of it on liquor, poker, and wild women. The rest of it I wasted.
Most of the tobacco money is already spent. In fact, many states pulled a JG Wentworth and have issued bonds to use the money before it ever arrived. They were anticipating the tobacco settlement payments will cover the money they were already spending. The NYT did a story on this back in 2012 when Nassau County was already in this predicament and in danger of defaulting on the bond payments.
State Bonds in Jeopardy as Tobacco Cash Fades
Maybe they’ll get a QTE(Quantitative Tobacco Easing) :)
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