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Posted on 05/21/2009 2:09:35 PM PDT by Drango
The House on Thursday approved tougher enforcement measures against contraband cigarette sales that make money for criminals, but cost federal, state and local governments billions of dollars.
The bill, which passed 397-11, is especially aimed at Internet sales. ~snip
Cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products could no longer be mailed through the U.S. Postal Service except in limited cases. Private delivery companies already have agreed not to ship tobacco products while the Postal Service continues to deliver products purchased over the Internet.
Misdemeanors under current law would be made felonies, and it would be a federal offense for any seller failing to pay state tax laws. ~snip
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would gain authority to inspect distributors of cigarettes, and anyone refusing the inspection would be penalized.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
Warentless searches are repugnant. Otherwise this is a good law and I hope it passes.
Overtax something and you create a black market.
buy your bacco seeds before it’s too late; and grow your own (then sell the rest to neighbors’ friends, acquantances ;)!
Libertarian Ping
How do they regulate sales from Indian reservations?
i've already done that. it's a good thing that most suburbanites don't know what a tobacco plant looks like. ;)
Sounds like a great idea until govt agents kick in your door, seize your home, freeze your bank account and garnish your wages to pay back taxes, fines, interest and penalties.
Think it won't come to that? The govt doesn't much like enterprising folks who try to circumvent paying taxes.
Sounds like the government moving in simply to protect their tax revenue. Screw them.
Some of the people on FR like to portray themselves as tax patriots, bucking the system, fighting the good fight, standing up to government. The line becomes rather dubious when it's revealed that they are mostly smokers and what they are advocating is becoming tax CHEATS. Unfortunately for them tax cheat isn't a conservative value.
You sound like a mix of Joe Biden and Henry Waxman. I think you’re on the wrong website.
Facts? Documentation? Backup? Link?
Growing tobacco for personal use is legal in all 57 states as I understand it although he amount is restricted. Please post evidence if I'm wrong. Commercial use is highly regulated.
And just for the record, the only smoking I partake in is an occasional cigar once or twice a year.
In an age when everyone wants their pet projects to be funded by tobacco taxes, personally, I couldn't care less if smokers found ways to avoid paying the taxes they've been burdoned with.
My argument that growing tobacco and then expecting a slap on the wrist when the revenuers find out about it is wishful thinking. Case in point, when Eliot Spitzer was AG of New York, he seized the customer records of internet tobacco sales and then sent the customers a tax bill with interest and penalties and garnished the wages of those who didn't immediately fork over the money, many owing thousands of dollars.
And yeah, I have a feeling you'd agree wholeheartedly with Spitzer on this.
I’ll put you in the approve of tax cheats column.
Fair enough question...How is it that conservative (at least some of them) care about teenager pregnacies? Or kids graduating from High School who can't read their diploma? Or fifteen-year-olds shooting one another, or seventeen-year-olds dying of AIDS.
To some conservatives children matter although it's fun to mock the cause here. Adults don’t smoke. Teenagers smoke and then become adults after it’s way too late to quit.
And what do these other issues have to do with the issue of government enforced excessive sin tax? Absolutely nothing. You are a typical liberal who attempts to change the subject when they can't defend their point of view.
Maybe you should take a class on logic, it might help your thinking.
I’m not talking about Tobacco with that statement.
I’m saying that the Government will happily criminalize your cultivation of a plant that is also a drug if it decides that’s what it wants to do. It already has been doing so for 70+ years with marijuana.
Tobacco is a drug. A legal drug. Growing Tobacco for personal use may be legal now...but what happens when Obama’s FedGov decides that it’s losing out on revenue from the self cultivators? It’s already taken a huge step with the recent sCHIP ‘roll your own’ 2200% tax increase.
Tobacco will eventually be treated just like other plant based drugs, in the name of revenue, and eventually ‘the public good’.
Why, the DEA is already equipped to find personal indoor Tobacco grow-rooms from helicopter based infared cameras. I’m sure they’d be happy to loan some equipment to their alphabet cousins at the ATF. Raids on private residence for illegal tobacco plants will be forthcoming. And it won’t surprise me one iota.
I’m an adult. And I quit.
I don’t need the nanny state’s help.
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