Posted on 03/29/2009 8:09:02 AM PDT by FromLori
Many non-smokers have said this new tobacco tax doesn't affect them. Think again!
When the Children's Health Insurance Reauthorization Act of 2009 goes into effect on April 1, 2009, there will be unintended consequences for everyone in the United States - whether or not they smoke. There are also expected consequences, such as cigarette smuggling across our border. According to the Arizona Department of Revenue, increased taxes on tobacco will increase black market sales as well as tobacco smuggling from Mexico. Within a year of the enactment of this tobacco tax, our federal government will begin a study to find out how much revenue is being lost to tobacco smuggling and to find ways to recover this lost revenue. However, those are only the expected consequences. To find out how this law will affect you, your family and our nation, read "SCHIP Tobacco Tax: Bad News for Smokers - Worse News for the U.S." at:
http://headsupusa.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/schip-tobacco-tax-increase-how-it-will-affect-non-smokers/
(Excerpt) Read more at freedomsphoenix.com ...
In many places it is far easier for kids (under 18) to buy MJ and other drugs than it is for them to buy cigarettes. Couple that with the tobacco nazis claim that tobacco is more addictive than heroine and crack, and what you have is more “kids” ignoring tobacco for the other stuff.
Spell Check is not always your friend.
I don't know that most pot smokers would have a problem with it either because prices would drop through the floor if it was legal and there would be an awful lot of room for taxes before people would be paying what they pay today. I think marijuana will eventually be legalized, and high taxes are just a given, just like we see high taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. Hopefully we'll learn our lesson with tobacco taxes and not tax pot so much that we encourage a big black market, which is exactly what we're likely to see with cigarettes.
Oh, and I do smoke cigarettes. I haven't minded the high taxes that much over the years but it is getting ridiculous. With new state taxes and the rise in price that has already accrued in my brand to reflect the coming federal tax I'm paying something like $50 or $60 a month more for my cigarettes now than I was a few months ago. With today's economy that really hurts. I have a brother-in-law who is starting tobacco plants now for the first time to blend with milder store bought tobacco and I would not be surprised to see a big increase in people growing their own and buying from black market sources. I'm sure the Mexicans who bring all the weed, cocaine and meth into our area would be more than happy to supply black market cigs too, anything to make an easy buck to send back home. We're going to see some decrease in cigarette smoking but we are likely to see a big increase in other problems too.
There is actually no contradiction here because the same folks who benefit from the demonization of tobacco users are also the ones funding the fight against fast food, alcohol, and firearms. IOW, their jobs are safe, they will just move on to the next target.
Happens to me all the time.
I don't plan on buying from the black market, however I do plan on growing my own. In fact, my husband is currently making another run to the garden center to pick up some more sterile seed starting mix and when he gets back we will be back out in the green house starting more tobacco seeds.
These kids are already smoking week and starting on harder stuff, they can't be bothered with cigarettes.
I listened to the "winning" essays of a 5th grade D.A.R.E. program and all but one of those essays focused solely on tobacco. The final one did hit on alcohol and cocaine, but still emphasized tobacco --- even though the student has learning disabilities due to fetal alcohol syndrome and his birth mother's cocaine addiction and other drug use. But it was the tobacco that caused him to have asthma and added to the learning disabilities.
The point I'm making is these kids are basically being taught that tobacco is THE worst of all the drugs. My daughter was in that class, which is why I was there that day and she could not believe some of the stuff they were "preaching" (her word, not mine) and basically wrote her essay just to be able to attend the field trip that comes up in May.
It's not taxing one group of people more than another, it's taxing certain harmful products more than other products. That helps pay for the problems caused to society by the harmful products. That seems reasonable to me, and in most cases it is far better than banning these products and having a black market where the demand is satisfied by organized crime groups. I'd rather the government taxed everything the same, but I don't think “sin taxes” are necessarily unconstitutional or particularly unfair. It isn't fair though to tax these products to the point that the revenues are higher than the excess costs society bears because of the harms these products cause and it makes no sense to tax them so much that it creates a big black market. That's just counterproductive.
Sin taxes are a fact of life we are going to have to live with. We live in a society where the mob rules and if they don't like something a minority do they want to ban it. Sin taxes are just a price we have to pay to have our vices be legal. Unfortunately freedom always seems to come at a price.
Personally, I think pot should never have been illegal.
But, let's suppose that it had been legal all these years.
Do you really think that it wouldn't have been subjected to onerous taxation by now, just like tobacco has?
Although I know that there are an awful lot of pot smokers (I used to be one myself), there are still a lot more alcohol users, which includes the important demographic of the lushes in Congress (see: Ted Kennedy et al).
In other words, in terms of taxation, pot users will still be a "minority" and will be subject to the tyranny of the majority just as tobacco smokers have been. And will be taxed up the wazoo. This will lead to the revival of the marijuana black market.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Oh, and I do smoke cigarettes. I haven't minded the high taxes that much over the years
I have, and I and many like-minded have been proven correct. Tax collecting vampires never lose their blood lust, they constantly seek out new sources.
I have a brother-in-law who is starting tobacco plants now for the first time to blend with milder store bought tobacco and I would not be surprised to see a big increase in people growing their own and buying from black market sources.
There might be a slight increase in people growing their own tobacco, but not enough to have a significant impact.
It takes land, time and space and expertise for the curing process. It's much easier to grow pot, actually.
And there's already a black market in tobacco. I don't necessarily see a decrease in tobacco use, just an increase in the black market. Where there's a will, there's a way.
I live on a teeny city lot, so I've been advertising in the "Services Wanted" section for "Reliable black market tobacco provider, must speak English, no wierdos please."
The whole gateway theory thing influences our drug education so much now. Kids who use tobacco and alcohol are far more likely than kids who do not use these substances to go on and use marijuana and even cocaine. That is a statistical fact. Too many people though I think believe that using tobacco and alcohol and even marijuana makes people want to use other drugs. There is no proof of that. It's just that those who will use these substances are more likely to be the types who would want to use harder substances than those who won't mess with any of it.
And it is true that kids who hang around before school smoking with the bad kids and who go out to beer drinking parties are just more likely to be exposed to other things they ought to leave alone. The problem is exacerbated with marijuana because especially in the case of Mexican marijuana it comes from the same people who supply most all the meth, cocaine and heroin consumed in this country.
But that's what's going on. The anti-drug educators focus on tobacco and alcohol mostly with kids at a younger age because they think if they can stop them from messing with those substances the kids won't go on to harder stuff. I think that's hogwash and it probably does make a lot of kids think all drugs are the same and therefore none are really worse than the other, but these anti-drug educators don't listen to people like you and me.
Personally, I think it is my responsibility to set my kids straight on these issues, not the government’s. We talk about what they learn at school and I try to clarify things for them. I try to teach them that all intoxicant use is bad whether we are talking about cigarettes, alcohol, or illegal drugs, but that some of these substances are far worse than others. I don't want my kids messing with any of it, but I darned sure want them to know that meth is a whole lot worse than beer or even pot. I don't want to encourage them to do any of this stuff, but most kids will do a little experimenting as teens and they need to know that some of this stuff is a whole lot more addictive and dangerous than some of the other stuff. That's just common sense we parents ought to try to impart on our children.
That's just annoying.
I agree.
“But, let's suppose that it had been legal all these years.
Do you really think that it wouldn't have been subjected to onerous taxation by now, just like tobacco has?”
Sure, it would have been heavily taxed. But pot smokers don't tend to smoke several ounces of pot a week like cigarette smokers tend to smoke several ounces of tobacco a week. A company like Phillip Morris pays less than $2.00 a pound for their tobacco in large bulk purchases, already dried and cured. I don't know that pot is so easy to produce as many people claim, but it shouldn't be that much more expensive than tobacco, not hundreds or even thousands of times as expensive per pound as tobacco. There really should be a lot of room for taxes on marijuana before it creates a black market. A little pot goes a long way. A cigarette has a almost a gram of tobacco in it and people will smoke several a day. I smoke more than 20 a day. A gram of pot is enough for several smoking sessions and people don't tend to chain smoke pot. You could actually stay high all day long only smoking a little every few hours. The point here is that pot smokers don't tend to consume that much pot. If legal it could be dirt cheap. There would be room for lots of taxes and that wouldn't bother pot smokers that much. Even costing several times what it should because it is illegal it's already cheaper than beer on a per use basis in most cases. It could have super high taxes on it and still be a little cheaper than it is now.
“In other words, in terms of taxation, pot users will still be a “minority” and will be subject to the tyranny of the majority just as tobacco smokers have been. And will be taxed up the wazoo.”
I don't doubt that.
“This will lead to the revival of the marijuana black market.”
Only if they tax it too much, make it more expensive than it is today for consumers. And again, that would take an awful lot of taxes once the monstrous price premium from it being illegal is removed. Think about it, pot is already heavily taxed in a way. Our government seizes millions of plants every year and thousands of tons of finished product. That's a big tax, even though our government doesn't profit from it. An awful lot of people in the illegal industry are arrested and put in prison for it so they demand huge profits, and it tends to change hands many times before it reaches the end consumer with everyone involved demanding a big amount of money for their involvement. It often doubles in price several times before it reaches the end consumer, and it costs a lot to produce to begin with compared to what it would cost to produce in a legal environment. It's grown in clandestine grows scattered out all over the place without modern equipment, or grown indoors under electric lights, something super expensive no legal producer would do. If it was legal it would be grown on a much larger scale than it is today by individual farmers in huge fields or in row after row of greenhouses like you would see with large hothouse tomato or flower growing operations. Production costs would be slashed. It would cost only a few bucks a pound to produce. It only change hands once or twice before it hit the “pot stores.” Producers and distributors would be working in huge volumes and would be able to make a healthy profit without making twice what they paid for it because they'd be doing such a high volume business. It won't cost thousands or even hundreds of dollars a pound. The only thing that would keep the cost to consumers anywhere in the same ballpark of what they are paying today will be super high taxes, and there will be a lot of room for taxes before consumers will have to pay more than what they pay today and have a lot of incentive to buy black market product sold by criminals that has not been produced in a regulated environment. I think it should be easy to “tax the crap” out of marijuana without encouraging a black market.
“Tax collecting vampires never lose their blood lust, they constantly seek out new sources.”
That's true. Hopefully they'll learn from overtaxing tobacco that taxing too much is just plain counterproductive.
“There might be a slight increase in people growing their own tobacco, but not enough to have a significant impact.”
You are probably right about that. But there is probably a point where tobacco gets so expensive that home growing and even illicit commercial production becomes worth all the trouble. The more expensive it becomes, the less people will worry about taste and all that. They'll just want their nicotine at a price they can afford.
“And there's already a black market in tobacco.”
I haven't seen that in my neck of the woods. That may very well change.
“I don't necessarily see a decrease in tobacco use, just an increase in the black market.”
I suspect we'll see both, but the problems caused by the increase in the black market are likely to negate any benefit we see from having fewer people smoke. What we probably won't see are huge increases in tax revenues from tobacco. And it may get to the point where revenues actually go down, not because so many people quit smoking, but because so many start buying from black market sources. We've already seen that problems in areas with super high tobacco taxes. It's going to get worse because organized crime will see the profit potential throughout the nation rather than just in a few locations and they'll really get on board with illegal cigarette sales. We'll end up causing a lot more problems than we solve.
After this revenue stream dries up how will SCHIPS get funded ? After everyone stops smoking will that wipe out lung cancer , heart attacks, and all the other stuff smoking is attributed to causing? Not hardly. While excessive smoking undoubtably contributes to bad health so does excessive anything else including exercize do the same.
The pseudo scientific grounds this law was passed on is quicksand. It was one way of getting another measure of socialism in place while telling tax payers OH its because of their faults, let them pay for it...very soon we will learn the expences of another expanded bureaucracy....
And there's the rub. The alcohol producers will be screaming for a "leveling of the playing field." The same tactic was used for smoking bans, whereby bar and restaurant owners in areas contiguous to areas where a smoking ban had been enacted screamed bloody murder until smoking bans by individual communities morphed into statewide smoking bans.
You raise an interesting point. If marijuana were legalized, it seems to make sense that it would be current tobacco producers who would segue into that area, putting them into direct competition with alcohol producers. Would we see Anheiser-Busch and others starting to gobble up tobacco companies? I hadn't thought about that very much.
That's a big tax, even though our government doesn't profit from it.
The cynic in me says that the government does profit from it. The pissy little Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs morphed into the monster-sized DEA. Government grew and there was much rejoicing in bureaucrat-land.
Only if they tax it too much, make it more expensive than it is today for consumers.
I agree with you that if it were legalized, the cost of production would drop. But I see no historical evidence, based on the tobacco jihad, that would lead me to assume that the government wouldn't see this as a huge opportunity to levy massive taxes on it right out of the box. They constantly underestimate when the "flinch point" has been reached. Yes, there would be savings on what had previously been discretely spent on marijuana operations by the DEA, but they'd only argue that crack, meth, heroin (fill in the blank) use had exponentially increased so a decrease in their budget would be the end of the world as we know it.
This is the slippery slope of "sin" taxes.
I sure don't see that happening. There is only a limited demand for those drugs and they don't tend to be all that easy to get and they are exorbitantly expensive. That wouldn't change if we legalized marijuana. IN fact, they might become harder to get because so often now they are coming from the countless numbers of people out there selling marijuana who get their product from the same sources where these other drugs come from. Mexican drug trafficking organizations supply most of what is consumed in this country of these these other drugs you mentioned, even though they make the lion's share of their money from marijuana sales. If we legalize marijuana, not only will they lose their most profitable product, but they'll lose one of their greatest resources for moving their meth, cocaine, and heroin, all the countless marijuana sellers who sell Mexican pot that the Mexican drug trafficking organizations tap to sell their other drugs.
I do. A bureaucracy's duty is to grow.
I've got to leave for a while (suppertime), so please don't think I'm ignoring you if you want to continue our conversation and I don't respond right away.
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