Neal Boortz (Entire article here):
Somebody damned sure should have been indicted in this one, though maybe not the police officers involved.
Some background .. then I’ll flesh out my insensitive thoughts.
Background .. On Staten Island the tax on one package of cigarettes is $5.85. That means a thirty-cents tax on every one of the 20 cigarettes in a pack. (There are 20 cigarettes, right? I’ve never bought a pack, so I don’t know). The tax on a carton of cigarettes would be $58.50. The actual price for a pack of ciggys in New York City, and that includes Staten Island, is over $15. A carton would be nearly $150.00.
Now just who is buying these cigarettes and paying these taxes? The poor, that’s who. Studies show that the only group in the country where smoking is not on the decline is the poor. The poorest among us – those making $13,000 or less, spend 26% of their income on tobacco. Idiots. But it makes sense. You have to be pretty damned ignorant to smoke, and ditto for being poor. I’ll cut some slack for physical or mental disasters .. but it’s so easy to avoid poverty in this country you really have to be a dumb mass to end up on the dole.
Here’s what we have then. New York state puts a huge tax on cigarettes, and New York City tops that tax with another $1.60 or so. So at over $15 a pack you’re not going to find many poor people buying their pack of Camels. What do they do? They go out on the street and buy cigarettes one at a time from people like Eric Garner.
The brilliant politicians want us to believe that they put this tax on cigarettes to make them unaffordable so people would quit smoking. HorseObama. It’s all about tax revenue. And when people like Eric Garner go out there and fill a marketplace demand for single cigarettes the government loses tax revenue; and governments don’t like to lose tax revenue.
Eric Garner was not depriving any person of life, liberty or property. He was violating nobody’s rights. He presented no threat to anyone. He was engaged in free enterprise – at a base level, but free enterprise nonetheless. The police are trying to say that he was harassing people on the sidewalk. Seems kinda flimsy to me. All they had to do was tell him to move on --- but noooooo. Eric was costing the state money, and this could not be allowed to stand; so he died. Not intentionally, but he died nonetheless.
Never forget the one power that government has which you do not. The government can use force, deadly force, to accomplish its goals. In this case the goal was for tax revenue .. tax revenue from the pathetic habits of the poor. When Eric Garner is found selling single cigarettes … which for some odd reason is illegal … he had to be stopped. Well, they sure stopped him.
But like I said … someone should have been indicted. The cop(s)? Perhaps. But I’m thinking of the politicians who put this absurd punishing tax on cigarettes in the first place. They knew what would happen. New York is surrounded by states with a lower tax rate on cigarettes, so they knew smuggling and resale would be an issue. No problem though. They had the cops. And they had to lawful right to order those cops to use force to make sure that by God those taxes were collected. And Eric Garner is dead. Find the right politician and indict them. Let them explain why a father had do die so they could collect their taxes.
