Untaxed tobacco is easy to grow. This one isn't actually supposed to be growing, it's the wrong time of year, but a seed wound up in my fall potting soil mix, and I let it live.
.50 BMG shown for scale.
/johnny
Meanwhile, liberals continue to believe that setting at tax rate at 100% will bring in the most revenue.
Sheesh....why can’t I ever find these black market cigarettes? I’d buy ‘em in a minute :-)
Untaxed tobacco is easy to grow. This one isn't actually supposed to be growing, it's the wrong time of year, but a seed wound up in my fall potting soil mix, and I let it live.
.50 BMG shown for scale.
/johnny
I remember in the mid 2000s buying two Beatles CDs from a street vendor at a great price and when I opened them there was no stamped decorative label on the actual CD, just a stamped #.
The insert paper foldout pictures were not prenent
The CDs worked fine
I think Michael Jackson didn’t get his cut of that sale.
Odd, considering that New Englanders love big government, paying taxes, and socialist programs.
More power to 'em !
People who buy black market cigs just hate children’s health programs, which tobacco taxes fund ;-)
The free and noncoerced exchange of goods and services, ie, the free market, is the default condition, like gravity.
The left can try to impose their version of Utopia but it’s like trying to overcome gravity. Eventually, it falls down to the default state.
So, how long before the number of packs a person can buy ANYWHERE in the country is limited? It’s amazing that Bloomberg didn’t try to pass a law prohibiting Virginia from selling cigarettes at a lower price than New York. It wouldn’t have forced Virginia to do it but it would have made Bloomberg feel good.
One day I had too much time on my hands and calculated how many packs of cigarettes would fit in a large semi-van. Don’t remember the specific numbers, but do remember the cost to be at least a few $million.
It is similar to Prohibition and the ways people got around the ban on alcohol. Cigarettes will find their way into NY from places like VA, which has comparatively low taxes on cigarettes. A carton costs about $45.
“...tax jurisdictions are losing out on up to $729 million in tax revenue...”
I love the phrasing. “Losing out on tax revenue”. It wasn’t theirs to lose.
MA people go to N.H. (or have someone pick them up).
The difference is about $20.00 a carton.
For a pack a day smoker that’s about $700.00 a year.
,
I live in NY and buy hardly anything here. I buy most things on the internet with zero shipping and zero sales tax. I buy ammunition and cigarettes in Pennsylvania because of laws and taxes respectively.
They have made the purchase so expensive and inconvenient that it is worth my time to travel a few miles more to obtain such things without hassle and fewer taxes.
Similar to Kansas with it’s high personal property tax on car registrations. People get around it by tagging their vehicles in other states. If they’re young and moved to Kansas for a job, they continue to register their vehicles at their parents address in the other state. If they’re older, they use their grown offspring’s address (who moved out of state for a career) as the address for registering their vehicle. Either way, Kansas loses millions of dollars in revenue every year due to these scofflaws, because the state refuses to be competitive with other states in the cost of car registration.
I am here in New York and besides smuggling there is another way. I am not sure of the details but I think pipe tobacco is not taxed at the same rate as cigarette tobacco. A carton costs about 80 to 90 bucks of brand name butts. There are two places around me that sell cartons for 40 bucks. You pick your tobacco and they load it into a rolling machine and you sit there and place them in a carton. The cigarettes don’t seem to have all the chemicals of brand names but they are just as good and it’s pure tobacco, sort of healthy free range smokes at half the cost.
And I just starting to experiment with E-Cigs now.
Screw you Mr. Revenuer.