Cigarette smokers and flavored tobacco scavengers from Massachusetts produced a surge of New Hampshire tobacco tax revenue that almost single-handedly prevented a business tax increase, preliminary, unaudited state figures suggest.
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Tobacco Taxes
Black Market Bloomberg
New York City Mayor Mike ‘Big Gulp’ Bloomberg has proposed raising the smoking age in New York City from 18 to 21 years of age. A companion proposal would hike the price of a pack of cigarettes to more than ten dollars per pack, presumably to a) convince more people to quit and b) recover revenue lost by prohibiting a big chunk of the tax base from paying taxes on cigarettes they are no longer permitted to smoke.
But how does New York’s evil super genius plan to recover the revenue lost to the expansion of the black market?
Extinguishing Tobacco Revenue In Our Lifetimes
I told them. If you want people to quit smoking, you had best not get used to the revenue from tobacco taxes. Don’t count on it for anything if you want to extinguish smoking in our lifetime. You know, make it history? But what did New Hampshire Democrats do when Republicans tried to back away from tobacco by lowering the tax just one thin dime? They snapped like addicts in withdrawal. They got the Democrat DT’s and everything.
You can’t cut the tobacco tax. We’re losing revenue. We need that revenue. I gotta have revvvaaaaannnooooo. (Insert primal scream here.)
Their new plan? Same as their old plan. Raise the tax on a product they don’t want around to tax. Yeah, that will fix the wagon (actually it wont) ….until January2014 when a provision in Obama-Care delivers the coup de gras.
“Oh Crap” Sayeth the NH Left, Tobacco Revenue Over Projection….Again.
Nothing makes me smile like watching another left wing New Hampshire Democrat narrative go up in smoke. Which narrative, you ask, there are so many to choose from? Why, the one about how irresponsible it was to cut the tobacco tax and how it would never stimulate enough other forms of cross border commerce to make up the difference. A notion that is not just backwards, it runs counter to the entire concept of the New Hampshire advantage.
So right out of the gate, the Democrats had no where to run on this issue–not that they didn’t try–and now things are looking bad for their tobacco tax narrative.