Posted on 01/15/2003 3:36:26 PM PST by Marianne
ALBANY - Tax avoidance by smokers has become so widespread that upward of 40 percent of all cigarettes consumed in the state are obtained through Indian smoke shops, the Internet and other places that don't charge state or local taxes, an industry group said Tuesday.
The rush by smokers to Indian retailers, out-of-state stores and Internet sites intent on bypassing the state's rising cigarette tax cost the government nearly $900 million in tax receipts last year, according to an industry-funded study by Fair Application of Cigarette Taxes, a group representing convenience shops, grocery stores, gas stations and others that sell cigarettes.
The long-simmering debate has intensified again as the industry groups seek to use the lost tax revenue numbers as leverage with government officials desperate to find cash to close a deficit estimated as high as $12 billion.
Native American representatives dismissed the study as a self-serving effort from an industry trying to take advantage of the state's budget deficit problems.
In a strange twist, Fair Application of Cigarette Taxes appeared Tuesday in Albany, allied with health care lobbyists with whom they had fiercely fought in past tax-increase battles. Both urged the state to restrict the sale of untaxed cigarettes.
"On this issue we have common ground," said Russell Sciandra, director of the Center for a Tobacco Free New York.
The health groups say tobacco consumption levels have fallen since the state last year pushed its cigarette taxes to the nation's second-highest - $1.50 per pack. However, they say the drop has not been nearly as much as it would have, had such easy ways to avoid taxes not been available to consumers.
"We want to see the full public impact of the increase in excise taxes," said Timothy Nichols, a lobbyist with the American Lung Association.
In the Buffalo area, non-Indian retailers say they have seen their revenues drop since last year's big cigarette tax increase as more and more of their customers head to Seneca smoke shops or the Internet.
The U.S. Supreme Court has said the state has a right to collect taxes on cigarette sales by Indians to non-Indians. But the Pataki administration, after once siding with non-Indian retailers and in the face of violent Indian protests, in 1997 backed off trying to collect the taxes from reservation sales.
Now, with the state facing a huge budget shortfall, industry officials believe they may have a new tactic to use in Albany to get officials to notice their plea.
The state "has a right to collect this tax to help solve the state's budget problem," said Dan Finkle, a Fulton County businessman and spokesman for Fair Application of Cigarette Taxes. His group is scheduled to hold a news conference today in Buffalo on the issue.
The group spent $17,000 on a study to look at uncollected taxes from cigarette sales. The group's consultant, using a variety of data, estimated up to $609 million in cigarette taxes went uncollected in 2001. By last year, that number had soared to nearly $895 million. Besides the state, local governments were money-losers since the nontaxed sales lowered what they would have otherwise collected in sales taxes.
I don't know; that's why I asked the question. But NY must owe it so somebody, or else it wouldn't be a debt or a deficit, and such a debt had to have been secured with some kind of collateral.
If you're a New Yorker, see if you can find out, then let me know. 
Maybe that's the same place California owes its Billions and Billions and Billions. I see where Wyoming has a surplus.
Boo-frickin'hoo. Dear Governement: KEEP YOUR PAWS OFF OF MY WALLET!
I quite agree. The members of Mensa I've known make the worse life choices and the most assholish mistakes conceivable, and they seem to all be liberals. They're pretty good at adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, though.
And they drive beat up old cars and for all those smarts don't seem to have any money. OTOH, the admission standards at CalTech and MIT are such that (before affirmative action) virtually all those admitted had IQs high enough to automatically qualify for MENSA.
Be careful you don't get popped for selling cig's w/o a government approved license or get busted for smuggling cig's, or anything else they can come up with!
Feeling like a mushroom are we?
I am just parroting the pompous WOD rabble around here who believe that pot smokers are worthy of capital punishment, while cigarette smokers should be allowed to smoke in church unabated. Constitutionally, I see no difference between nicotine and THC. There that should piss off 80% of the registered FReep's.
If anything, smokers, who supposedly die at a younger age, cost the government less: less in social security payouts.
Or so it would seem.
Military commissary: $18.00 a carton for my brand. If I had to pay $50 I would probably quit, though, I have to admit.
Don't remember where I got that quote, but the hysteria was the same as that found in the smoking issue. And the very same gazillionaire scumsucking attorneys who are STILL picking smokers' pockets have set up shop together and are going after guns. (And any other deep pockets they can find.)
But what they're really doing is destroying the Constitution, creating disrespect for the law, and weakening the soul of America.
Bad laws deserve the anarchy they create and create the anarchy they deserve.
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