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It doesn't appear that legalization really does stop smuggling.
well if you tax the hell out of booze and cigs, what the hell do you expect $12 dollars for a back of cigs in new york.. guess they should drop the price..
It looks like they might have been smuggling into Mexico ... not sure of the legalities there, but since they were arrested ... <shrug>
NO WAY!!! They had to be smuggling in. A pack of smokes is .80 in Mexico. Do the math on 600,000 packs at $4. Same with whiskey because there's no insane alcohol tax.
Right now there are trucks full of cigarettes rolling in to NY from the southern states to double their money. Cigarette tax fraud is HUGE money.
Another item that is often smuggled are pirated music and movie CD's. You can legally buy a music CD for maybe $11 or $12 but you can get a smuggled one for $1.
NO WAY!!! They had to be smuggling in. A pack of smokes is .80 in Mexico. Do the math on 600,000 packs at $4. Same with whiskey because there's no insane alcohol tax.
Right now there are trucks full of cigarettes rolling in to NY from the southern states to double their money. Cigarette tax fraud is HUGE money.
Well -- still -- NAFTA was supposed to be for free trade but obviously is only for some special businesses. There are still taxes and regulations for the little people. Since some benefit very nicely from NAFTA and all the so-called free trade, I'm not sure it is exactly right that someone bringing in cheaper cigarettes or whisky which are perfectly legal would be arrested.
well if you tax the hell out of booze and cigs, what the hell do you expect $12 dollars for a back of cigs in new york.. guess they should drop the price..
I think it is this ^. I favor legalization but acknowledge that not all drug-related crime will disappear.
[another example of teh circumvention of laws even when the product is legal is under-age drinking]
Mexican authorities arrested two men in Juárez on charges of smuggling 12 million cigarettes and 18,000 bottles of whiskey, officials said today.
The men, whose identities were not disclosed, were arrested on the Mexican side of the Ysleta-Zaragoza international bridge Wednesday afternoon, a spokesperson for the Mexican Attorney General's office said today.
Goes to show no-one bothers to actually read any articles documented in the threads started in this forum....
The article does not say which direction they were being smuggled. But it seems unlikely they were smuggling cigs from the US to Mexico, given that steven_h says a pack of cigs is 80 cents in Mexico.
In Washington state until this year we finally got rid of our state liquor stores and allowed booze sales in groceries, etc. But to get it passed, the proponents laid a whale of a tax package on booze. I think the effective tax rate comes to well over 50 pct. Doubtless we will have a thriving black market for booze.
Justice John Marshall said "the power to tax is the power to destroy." If tax rates are set high enough, the effect is little different from an outright ban, so black markets and criminality will result.
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$12 dollars for a back of cigs in new york.. guess they should drop the price..
