2-What else are you doing to defeat the government's efforts to extort smokers?
3-What are you going to do when government enforces interstate sales tax?
4-How do you feel about the overwhelming percentage of smokers who continue to pay the tax increases?
Cigarettes are deadly. We all know folks who have died from them and I'm next, I suppose, puff, puff.
I have a long-time friend who has lung cancer now.
Although I don't agree with the taxes, I do agree with the anti-smoking campaign, because the peer-pressure works better than prohibition, IMHO.
"Don't worry comrade, we did run out of creme filling but we found something else just as good."
6- How does it avoid the assertion that it is "arbitrary and capricous" if the alternative, making tobacco an illegal substance is available any time?
Still a person can buy cigarettes here and make a handsome profit selling them in places like New York. It is just like probition. I live close to the Kentucky border and travel there one or two days a week. The tax there is 3 cents a pack. That's where I intend to do my grocery shopping from now on, and the Ohio retailers lose out on cigarette sales and groceries. Some people are making money buying cigarettes in bulk and comming to Ohio to sell them for thousands of dollars in profit. Already there has been one case where terrorist fund raisers were black marketing cigarettes across state lines to fund Al Queda.
The politics of cigarette tax will have little or no effect on the rate of smoking and the additional revenue raised by state governments will evaporate once they find out what it costs to enforce the law. Thanks Bob Taft for signing a piece of legislation that was just plain stupid.