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 ...
Unintentional hillarity has broken out.
Be sure to git some.
HAHAHAHAHA!!
(me too)
No hyper ventilating.
I just want people to be aware of the evil and danger that exists right here on FR, and the futility of trying to engage in a rational discussion.
The tobacco nazis are blooming like spring daffodils, it seems.
Well Bunky, I sure hope you don’t have any “vices”, like cheeseburgers, because just as sure as Hell, some nanny state type will come along and make sure you understand that YOU are contributing to the deaths of thousands by your eating habits. You are setting a bad example, you are killing animals just to eat them, you are not due individual decisions because you are WRONG!!!!!
See how that works?
Hey, here’s something to ponder....
WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND.
I would grow mine too, but can’t figure out how to cure it in my little cabin.
No, but it’s not government’s place to tell people what to do. It’s common sense that smoking is bad for you, but educate people, don’t try to force them unless they are hurting someone else’s life/property. Parents need to keep track of what their children do, but I can agree that Children, who don’t know any better tobacco should be restricted for, but not for adults, which can decide for themselves!
Tobacco was a huge business in NC, and still is; nothing like it once was, though. My paternal ancestors came to the colonies, to Maryland, in the 1600's to grow tobacco. They left Maryland to lease a plantation in modern-day Annandale, VA known as Ravensworth, to grow tobacco. They then came to NC before the Revolutionary War, that several of them fought in, to grow tobacco.
They grew tobacco on the land granted to my fifth great grandfather as a result of his service in the Revolution. They grew tobacco through the War Between The States, had several crops destroyed. Through Reconstruction, through the Depression, and into the 70's, they grew it. Got out during that decade though; the handwriting was on the wall. Still generated income from the allotment system, until that was dismantled.
It's a cash crop, profitable like no other that can be grown here. Like many things humans ingest, it can cause problems when used excessively. But, it produces an astounding amount of tax revenue, even before this ludicrous "for the children" extortion, so these greedy, fat pigs jostling at the trough just can't bring themselves to make it illegal.
Fools, the lot of them.
The Federal Government receives, by far and away, the most profit from tobacco, moreso than anyone else. Not the eeeevil tobacco companies and not the growers.
The hypocrisy is as astounding as the former profitability that now goes to Washington, DC.
Thank you for sharing about your family. Do you do genealogy? I've been fascinated by the things that I've found. :-)
I’ve schooled you once on the Constitution, do you need more education?
I’ve spent some time on genealogy, yes. You’d be surprised what you can learn from Revolutionary War pension applications.
Tobacco was the cash crop that the nation was built on.
Do it again.
You're "schooling" us alright. Not sure what Constitution you're reading, though. Yours apparently involves life, safety and the pursuit of a padded cell.
If you have a Constitutional argument that tobacco should not be regulated/taxed...I’m listening. Please educate me.
"If taxes are laid upon us without our having a legal representation where they are laid, we are reduced from the character of free subjects to the state of tributary slaves." Samuel Adams
Bored people try to control others lives.
"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat in our drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labors and in our amusements, for our callings and our creeds...our people.. must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live.. We have not time to think, no means of calling the mis-managers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow suffers. Our landholders, too...retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must...be contented with penury, obscurity and exile.. private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance.
This is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in it's train wretchedness and oppression." Thomas Jefferson
So that’s a NO? You don’t have a constitutional argument?
I have found 3 RW vets in my family so far but haven’t gotten their records from DAR or SAR. And one that came over on the Fortune in 1621 because of religious persecution. In finding these men, I have also learned more about history. It’s been fascinating.
You don’t have one.
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