Eric Garner Died Because Of High Cigarette Taxes
For all the outrage--in many ways justifiable--in the past few years about police treatment of African Americans, it was very telling how silent the media and political class was about Eric Garner, a man surrounded by five NYC police officers who died when one of the cops put him in a chokehold. The incident was caught completely on camera and fed into the national storyline perfectly of a police force using unnecessary force against an African American that resulted in his death. So why was virtually nobody in the political class or the media talking about this case until the shocking failure of the grand jury to indict the offending officer forced them to? Why did they instead preserve all their ink and outrage for the far more ambiguous Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri?
Because if the Eric Garner incident gets a full public hearing, one of America's best-kept secrets is at risk of coming out--the mass formation of a new black market for cigarettes that came to fruition because of outrageously high taxes on tobacco which is turning thousands of people like Eric Garner into criminals and costing taxpayers millions of dollars in enforcement. It's incredibly hard for anybody to explain why five New York City cops are bearing down on this nonviolent middle-aged man over selling loose cigarettes, and it's a conversation they never hoped they would have since it could threaten to disrupt the scores of billions of dollars worth of cigarette tax revenue that every level of government fancies itself entitled to. The NYC police put Eric Garner to his death because the message came from above that tobacco tax collection is one of the highest priorities of law enforcement....and that everybody from NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio to Governor Andrew Cuomo to President Barack Obama wants to get their grubby paws on that cigarette tax cheddar.
So I have to give props for Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, somebody I rarely agree with, and to a bunch of commentators on Fox News, who I hardly ever agree with, for publicly pointing out that Eric Garner would be alive today if greedy politicians hadn't repeatedly preyed upon downscale (and often mentally ill) tobacco users for path-of-least-resistance blood revenue. The sticker price for artificially expensive cigarettes is now so far removed from cigarettes' market value that an entire black market industry with thousands of players all over the country has turned it into the fastest-growing criminal enterprise on the globe.
And how has the left responded to Senator Paul and others making this point? Very defensively....and the defensiveness speaks volumes about their desperation to silence this debate before it exposes their fraud. Many of them were at the forefront of the broader culture war on smokers that goes back decades, and the centerpiece of that war was ever-rising cigarette taxes. The instigators either didn't consider or didn't care about the pernicious consequences that would inevitably come when they priced a product consumed by 50 million Americans beyond their ability to afford. And now that it's become clear that they have Eric Garner's blood all over their hands, they deem it inappropriate to discuss the topic and wish to focus exclusively on police brutality rather than the conditions that brought about the police brutality.
Given how lazy the media is and how short their attention span is, the instigators of the tobacco tax frenzy that led to Eric Garner's death just might get out of this without their secret being exposed at a widespread level. They better hope they do as the tobacco taxers show absolutely no indication of seeking alternative means of collecting the revenue needed to keep the nation's lights on. Several states have increased their cigarette tax--sometimes dramatically--in the last couple of years. In just the past few months, the city of Philadelphia raised cigarette taxes dramatically to pay off the school district's deficit. And President Obama proposed another $1 a pack federal cigarette tax hike last year to pay for universal preschool.
Government is doubling down on mortgaging the nation's financial future on wildly overpriced cigarettes. That will not come without consequence. Eric Garner is thus far the highest-profile "consequence" of gluttonous tobacco tax policy, but it seems pretty safe to say he won't be the last.
Because if the Eric Garner incident gets a full public hearing, one of America's best-kept secrets is at risk of coming out--the mass formation of a new black market for cigarettes that came to fruition because of outrageously high taxes on tobacco which is turning thousands of people like Eric Garner into criminals and costing taxpayers millions of dollars in enforcement. It's incredibly hard for anybody to explain why five New York City cops are bearing down on this nonviolent middle-aged man over selling loose cigarettes, and it's a conversation they never hoped they would have since it could threaten to disrupt the scores of billions of dollars worth of cigarette tax revenue that every level of government fancies itself entitled to. The NYC police put Eric Garner to his death because the message came from above that tobacco tax collection is one of the highest priorities of law enforcement....and that everybody from NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio to Governor Andrew Cuomo to President Barack Obama wants to get their grubby paws on that cigarette tax cheddar.
So I have to give props for Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, somebody I rarely agree with, and to a bunch of commentators on Fox News, who I hardly ever agree with, for publicly pointing out that Eric Garner would be alive today if greedy politicians hadn't repeatedly preyed upon downscale (and often mentally ill) tobacco users for path-of-least-resistance blood revenue. The sticker price for artificially expensive cigarettes is now so far removed from cigarettes' market value that an entire black market industry with thousands of players all over the country has turned it into the fastest-growing criminal enterprise on the globe.
And how has the left responded to Senator Paul and others making this point? Very defensively....and the defensiveness speaks volumes about their desperation to silence this debate before it exposes their fraud. Many of them were at the forefront of the broader culture war on smokers that goes back decades, and the centerpiece of that war was ever-rising cigarette taxes. The instigators either didn't consider or didn't care about the pernicious consequences that would inevitably come when they priced a product consumed by 50 million Americans beyond their ability to afford. And now that it's become clear that they have Eric Garner's blood all over their hands, they deem it inappropriate to discuss the topic and wish to focus exclusively on police brutality rather than the conditions that brought about the police brutality.
Given how lazy the media is and how short their attention span is, the instigators of the tobacco tax frenzy that led to Eric Garner's death just might get out of this without their secret being exposed at a widespread level. They better hope they do as the tobacco taxers show absolutely no indication of seeking alternative means of collecting the revenue needed to keep the nation's lights on. Several states have increased their cigarette tax--sometimes dramatically--in the last couple of years. In just the past few months, the city of Philadelphia raised cigarette taxes dramatically to pay off the school district's deficit. And President Obama proposed another $1 a pack federal cigarette tax hike last year to pay for universal preschool.
Government is doubling down on mortgaging the nation's financial future on wildly overpriced cigarettes. That will not come without consequence. Eric Garner is thus far the highest-profile "consequence" of gluttonous tobacco tax policy, but it seems pretty safe to say he won't be the last.
posted by Mark at 3:47 PM
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