As part of my never-ending quest to be fair-minded and see the silver lining, I’ve managed to think of one group of citizens who will benefit from, and have reason to appreciate, the otherwise contemptible, ridiculous failure of the S.C. House to override Mark Sanford’s veto of the cigarette tax increase. They’re not citizens of S.C. (and come to think of it, Furio’s not even a citizen of this country), but let’s not get picky.
In case you haven’t done the math on this, the S.C. tax on cigarettes is 7 cents (yes, 7 cents) a pack. In New York City, it’s $4.25 a pack. Imagine the profit on a truckload of cartons, even if you don’t steal the truck. As if I-95 needed MORE traffic…
The Wall Street Journal recently explained the profitability to O.C. of the New York taxes. Of course, being the WSJ — the only publication in the world that actually believes Mark Sanford is a contender for John McCain’s running mate (and even then it’s just the ideologues on the editorial board) — was arguing that the N.Y. tax was a bad thing.
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."Crime rapidly spread beyond New York’s borders, as
trucks carrying cigarettes across the country were hijacked and
businesses selling them robbed to supply New York’s black market. In
1972, the chairman of a New York commission told Congress that
retailers and other workers were "confronted almost daily with the risk
and dangers of personal violence which are now inherent in their
industry."
But from a South Carolina perspective, what that math says is that we could stop that traffic from coming out of our state — but only if we were willing to raise the tax by several times the lousy 50 cents we were talking about. But being South Carolina, and having our Legislature and our governor, we couldn’t even manage that, which is of course beneath pitiful.
I should add that the WSJ piece also dealt with the connection between cigarette smuggling and terrorism. But thanks to South Carolina, ordinary decent American criminals are in a position to keep competing with the foreign bad guys.
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That $4.25 per pack tax in NYC makes it profitable for organized crime to smuggle cigarettes into NYC. Hopefully they buy them in SC and help pump some more Yankee dollars down here.
And yes, I know that’s not the Bing in the picture. But I thought you’d get it more quickly than if the headline had said “Guys at Satriale’s”…
If the WSJ is so off base, why bother to read it religiously every day?
One of my favorite unappreciated lines from “Goodfellas” is from the early scene where Henry and Tommy as kids are selling hijacked cigarettes out of the trunk of a car … when they bribe a police officer with a few gratis cartons, the cop happily shrugs off his ethics by noting:
“I’d complain, but who’d listen?”
… gosh, someone should put that phrase on a T-shirt …
“And when the cops assigned a whole army to stop Jimmy, what did he do? He made them partners.”
p.m. — I’m able to get it delivered at home, along with The State. Also, it’s the only paper they get, other than The State, at the place where I eat breakfast.
I’d get The NYT at home, too, but they won’t deliver it on my side of the river. I’m not kidding. It’s really frustrating.
So I don’t see the NYT until I get to the office, and by that time, the day is going full-blast and it’s hard to read anything.
I had been wondering when somebody was going to ask that. I had just been thinking about doing a post on the subject this past weekend, probably because I noticed myself quoting the WSJ so often…
The WSJ is one of the few real newspapers in America.
It’s one of the best, a fact that I hope Mr. Murdock doesn’t spoil. I certainly enjoy reading it — even the editorial page, which occupies a sort of Alternative Universe. It’s a universe where our governor would be a mainstream thinker. That’s how far out it is.
As I think I’ve pointed out before, the three publications I read the most, aside from The State, are the WSJ, the NYT and The Economist.
The WSJ editorial page has thinkers, which sets it apart from the NY Times and WaPost.
It’s one of the few papers that puts any effort into news stories with content.
Thanks for answering my question, Mr. Warthen, though you didn’t actually answer it until you responded to Lee’s post.
So it’s The State, the WSJ, the NYT and The Economist.
Well, two out of four is a 50-50 proposition.
The WSJ has “thinkers?” Yeah, if you mean they’re consistently totally wrong and, even better, not factual. Of course, facts have a liberal bias, so that kind of goes against the “reality is what I say it is” meme of modern conservatism. But, that’s just the editorial pages. The news department is usually very good, which is why the news people and the editorial people don’t get along at that paper.
IOW, “Jimmy” doesn’t read the WSJ and has no examples of the writing which so offends him.
If “Jimmy” had read my post, he would understand that I was complimenting the WSJ on their news coverage, which he also acknowledged to be very good.
Yes, I find the NY Times and most editorial writers too shallow to read very often.