http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060606/POLITICS/606060397
Cigarette tax singes poor, old
State slaps 3,500 more smokers with bills for buying cartons online.
Sarah Ryley / The Detroit News
MOUNT CLEMENS -- When Marilyn Mostek, a senior living in a subsidized apartment, heard she could save $20 on a carton of cigarettes by ordering from an out-of-state Indian reservation, she thought she had found a clever way to save money.
Those savings went up in smoke on May 19 when she received a bill from the state of Michigan for $511 in unpaid cigarette taxes -- nearly half of her fixed monthly income. Her neighbor, Robert Stutsman, received a bill the same day for $744.
Mostek, 69, and Stutsman, 75, are among 11,000 Michigan residents who over the past year and a half have felt the pinch of a state crackdown on people who have avoided Michigan's cigarette tax by buying from out-of-state vendors online.
The bills, averaging $1,787, have hit the elderly and poor particularly hard.
Well, there are two seperate components.
First, whereas conservatives tend to prefer taxes which generate revenue to fund essential public services to be raised in the most painless way possible, liberals tend to prefer to use the tax system to punish behavior of which they disapprove.
Second, don't you have indian reservations in Michigan. People here go to the reservation store to buy tobacco free from the state tax. Maybe the state government is trying to redirect business to the indians.
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