The Smokes, Juice, Guns & Tan Tax

The price of cigarettes is up, just like the price of fresh-squeezed fruit and vegetable juice. If one expects to buy a fresh juice in the East Village, one should expect to pay more for it. If one expects to buy a pack of cigarettes at the bodega in Flushing, they can expect to pay an extra $5.85 State and City tax on it. The juice is good for you but the cigarettes are bad. The words "good" and "bad" allow New York State to name the cigarette tax a "sin tax," imposing a moral connotation to alcohol, gambling, sugary soda, junk food, whatever the taxable sin. The proposed tax on sugary soda failed, and plenty of people who self-righteously slam smoking are merciless slurpers of Coke and Mountain Dew.

The set of intentions involved in doing something healthy is a valuable commodity for business and the government. The effort to do something unhealthy, like smoke, is likewise a human behavior favorably capitalized. There are one or two places in NYC to buy a fresh juice for relatively cheap, like the Juice Bar outside tony "Coffeeshop" in Union Square; and a smoker can buy cigarettes online priced stupendously cheaper and stamped with the seal of the sovereign nation of Moldova. However, if the NYC Dept. of Taxation and Finance has already red-flagged the online cig dealer, and your name appears in its accounts receivable records, you will receive a city bill for unpaid sin taxes. Can't just a little bit of the dough go to the child slaves in Kazakhstan?



It could be argued that a majority of Americans contemplate cigarettes as "badder" than guns. Guns and cigarettes are used for leisure purposes, but cigarettes don't murder you instantly nor are they normally purchased as weapons. Just last week, "the Wyoming Department of Revenue has suspended sales tax collections from gun shows because of increasing animosity toward the state's field tax agents." Apparently the gun freaks in Cheyenne have feelings akin to smokers in New York. As Jerry Reed sang in 1958, "You Make it, They Take It."



The NY Times reports that "in the Senate, where Republicans and many rank-and-file Democrats had opposed the tax increase, the bill including the higher taxes passed narrowly along party lines, with all 32 Democrats voting yes and all 29 Republicans present voting no." Popularly, the Right is the party of gun freaks, as the Left hankers for big government. Conservatives fear that the welfare paradigm will degrade the American citizen's work ethic so badly, that one's property won't be safe from the debased, thieving entitlement of lower-class workers, who will turn violent and maraud, and must be defended against with automatic rifles and .357 Magnums.

Liberals fetishize the veneer of hipster health, and smokers serve as the rare instance where prejudice and intolerance is OK for a lefty. The cigarette "sin tax" is to "provide $440 million in revenue for health care programs, including subsidies for AIDS drugs, money for tobacco cessation programs and $71.6 million for the state cancer research center in Buffalo." Fair enough. What about the tax hike on tanning salons? Now the finances of Vicki Vagizzi from North Caldwell, NJ, who loves to tan and smoke, are in jeopardy. Vicki isn't eligible for welfare, but luckily prefers sugary soda over fresh carrot, beet & orange juice.

POSTSCRIPT:
An egregious allocation of taxpayer money is nicely intimated by certain details of the recent Russian spy ring bust.