OMG, that GL news is hilarious.

Is this the Project Greenlight thread? Because I just saw an ad for Feast on DVD.

I was unaware that there was such a thing as tobacco smuggling but it intrigues me.

Tobacco smuggling is pretty big in Alaska, at least in some areas. We have pretty high tobacco taxes I hear, although I don't pay that much attention to the rate because I don't smoke.

I used to post here.

But, yeah, tobacco smuggling. When I was a kid in North Carolina, my dad used to own a small grocery. (My dad was a grocer.) And since we lived relatively close to I-95, people who were traveling from New York would always stop in an load up on cartons and cartons of cigarettes.

Don't really know if they were "smuggling." But they were at least taking advantage of packs of cigarettes for less than three dollars.

One of the fun things the NC state police got to do was pull over semi trailers loaded stem to stern with cartons of NC-priced, NC-made cigarettes, bound for the Nawth and bootleg prices. It was a booming business for a very long time, as long as you didn't get caught. The demand is less these days because of the decrease in smoking, and the increase in taxes that bring NC prices in line with the rest of the country make the profit margin much smaller, so smuggling isn't the big thing it used to be.

Unless somebody can get hold of a truckful of untaxed cartons, of course.

People used to smuggle cigarettes down from Canada all the time -- very big business. Just like smuggling hooch in from Canada during Prohibition.

I once heard economics professors arguing over what point sales taxes generated massive evasion. One claimed that anything over 10% tended to generation major smuggling ; the other said that the break point was more like 50%. I wonder if there have been any empirical studies. I suspect it would not be as simple as a percentage. Legal sources that are less highly taxed such as reservations or N.Carolina probably make a difference - since you can buy them legally, you just are not supposed to sell them.

If Firefly were still an operating universe, I'd be tempted to write an essay on what the fact that it paid to smuggle horses via spaceship showed about the economics of it.

People used to smuggle cigarettes out of virginia to the nawth all of the time.

And there was beer being smuggled (Coors? Bud?) the other direction in the cannoball run. Also a lot people buy cars in Oregon (no sales tax) to use in Washington State (big sales) tax. The buyer is supposed to report their purchase to the department of revenue, but that gets neglected a lot.

Good grief. We're talking about tobacco smuggling in the Tim thread and no-one has yet mentioned Sharon and Totem Mole. :)

Everybody have fun at the Expo this weekend?

I went to a film festival and was one of the judges. There was cake, it was great.