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THE JOB-CREATING IOWA CIGARETTE TAX
May 08, 2008
While the $1-per-pack cigarette tax was primarily a revenue grab by our free-spending state officials, it may have an unintended side effect. It will replace the many of the good meth manufacturing jobs exported to Mexico by the pseudoephedrine crackdown with high-quality cigarette smuggling jobs. From the Tax Foundation:
The blunt fact, which politicians of both political parties are determined to ignore, is that high cigarette taxes in New York have led to a bloody, decades-long smuggling epidemic.While the problem first surfaced during the Great Depression, tax hikes in the early 1960s created a major profit opportunity for smugglers and kicked the epidemic into high gear. By 1967, a quarter of the cigarettes consumed in the Empire State were bootlegged. New York City's finance administrator labeled cigarette smuggling the "principal stoking facility of the engine of organized crime."
Smuggling? That can't happen here!
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