Archive for February 23rd, 2012

Unintended consequences.

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

We previously noted New York City’s “roll your own tobacco shops” which were not much more than a blatant attempt to get around cigarette taxes. (I thought I linked to this at the time, but I can’t find the link now; the shops reached a settlement with the city and closed down, last I heard.)

Well, now the Indian tribes have gotten into the act. You see, the tribes used to buy smokes wholesale from distributors and resell them, tax free. But the state of New York went to court, and got a ruling that requires the wholesalers to collect taxes.

Now the Indian tribes are making their own brands of cigarettes.

The tribes argue that because they are sovereign nations, the cigarettes they make are exempt from the state’s $4.35-a-pack excise tax, the highest in the United States. But the tobacco industry and owners of other convenience stores say tribal cigarette manufacturing is just an elaborate form of tax evasion.

And there’s rent seeking:

The New York Association of Convenience Stores, which had urged Mr. Cuomo to collect taxes on name-brand cigarettes sold by tribes, is now pushing the governor to target Indian brands. “There remains an enormous tax-evasion problem to be addressed,” James Calvin, the association’s executive director, said.
David Sutton, a spokesman for Altria, the parent company of the country’s largest cigarette maker, Philip Morris, said, “All cigarettes sold to non-Native American New Yorkers need to be tax-paid — regardless of who manufactures them — or New York State will continue to lose legitimate and significant tax revenue, and law-abiding retailers will continue to be impacted by cigarette tax evasion.”

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Speaking of cops…

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

There are two things that amuse me about the NYPD’s secret “Newark, New Jersey Demographics Report”:

  1. The number of “Identified Locations” that are fried chicken places. “Newark Fried Chicken”. “Kansas Fried Chicken”. “Utah Fried Chicken”. Utah Fried Chicken? “Detroit Fried Chicken and Pizza”: hey, mad props for diversification. “Chicken Holiday”? Not much of a holiday for the chicken after you cut it up and fry it, is it?
  2. The NYPD managed to find the Dunkin Doughnuts (page 52). The jokes, they just write themselves.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Listen all y’all, it’s an arbitrage…

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Nothing to see here, just me being silly. And yes, it is true that I do my own stunts.

Posted in Music, Photography, Wordplay | 5 Comments »

Obit watch: February 23, 2012.

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Barney Rosset, Grove Press publisher.

Rosset brought the court cases that allowed “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, “Tropic of Cancer”, and “Naked Lunch” to be published in the United States. He was also behind the distribution of “I Am Curious (Yellow)” (yet another court case) and “Titicut Follies” (yet another court case, and the most horrifying movie I’ve ever seen).

Joe Bob Briggs’s write-up of “I Am Curious (Yellow)” in Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History goes into more detail about Grove Press and some of the colorful incidents in Rosset’s history (the Cuban exile bombing, the unionization attempt, etc.)

And:

Mr. Rosset turned down J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” saying he “couldn’t understand a word”

Posted in Books, Clippings, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed