Nicotine fights. (Bootlegging and Violence)."INCREASING THE cigarette tax saves lives," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared last year while pushing a 19-fold increase in the city's levy. To the contrary, suggests a recent report from the Cato Institute: Increasing the cigarette tax can be deadly. In July the combined state and local cigarette tax in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. hit $3 a pack, the highest in the country. Patrick Fleenor, former chief economist at the Tax Foundation, argues that the steep hike is bound to promote the sort of black market activity that has been associated with violence in the past. During the first four months after the tax hike, according to official figures, cigarette sales in the city fell by So percent compared to the same period in 2001. But that doesn't mean New York has half as many smokers as it did before Bloomberg came to their rescue. The official figures do not reflect border shopping (which nowadays includes online sales as well as purchases in other states) or bootlegging bootlegging, in the United States, the illegal distribution or production of liquor and other highly taxed goods. First practiced when liquor taxes were high, bootlegging was instrumental in defeating early attempts to regulate the liquor business by taxation. . As Fleenor shows, New York has along, bloody history of cigarette bootlegging, with smugglers fighting among themselves, hijacking hijacking Crime of seizing possession or control of a vehicle from another by force or threat of force. Although by the late 20th century hijacking most frequently involved the seizure of an airplane and its forcible diversion to destinations chosen by the air pirates, when trucks, and robbing dealers. "The enormous profits that can be made smuggling smuggling, illegal transport across state or national boundaries of goods or persons liable to customs or to prohibition. Smuggling has been carried on in nearly all nations and has occasionally been adopted as an instrument of national policy, as by Great Britain cigarettes into New York have lured smalltime small·time or small-time adj. Informal Insignificant or unimportant; minor: a smalltime actor. small crooks, mobsters Mobsters is a 1991 crime drama detailing the creation of the National Crime Syndicate/The Commission. Set in New York City during the Prohibition era, it's a somewhat fictionalized account of rise of Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Benjamin "Bugsy" , street gangs, and terrorists into the racket," he writes. "Those criminals have engaged in a host of violent activities, including murder, kidnapping, and armed robbery, to earn and protect their illicit profits....If history is any guide, the involvement of several rival groups in large-scale cigarette smuggling operations that also face competition from small-scale bootleggers creates a very volatile situation." If you think Fleenor's warnings are overwrought o·ver·wrought adj. 1. Excessively nervous or excited; agitated. 2. Extremely elaborate or ornate; overdone: overwrought prose style. , consider what NewYork Gov. Malcolm Wilson said in 1974. "One major incentive to organized crime," he observed, "is the high NewYork City cigarette taxes, piled on top of the state tax, which have made that city the promised land for cigarette bootleggers." Taking inflation into account, the tax when Wilson spoke was less than half what it is now. |
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