-By Warner Todd Huston
Rumors are once again rumbling in the cash-starved, big spenders in California’s legislature to raise tobacco taxes. But does this work? History says that not only does the tax hike rarely bring in more money to the state the hike also causes more crime as criminals move in with black market good s at cheaper prices.
Once again the denizens of Sacramento are looking to a huge hike in taxes. Earlier this year Senator Kevin de Leon floated a scheme to raise taxes by two dollars a pack for cigarettes.
Democrats claim that this will bring in millions of dollars in new taxes a year but other states have tried this and found that instead of bringing in what legislators thought would come in all they got was more black market crimes and cigarette smuggling.
In 2012, for instance, the State of New York raised cigarette taxes yet still had a $130 million shortfall. The new taxes did not bring in what Empire State legislators projected.
But this is the least of the problems that large hikes in tobacco taxes bring to a state. The biggest problem is that it also brings a hike in crime.
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High Cigarette Taxes Bring Little Revenue and New Crime”
In the run up to the 2012 election an out-of-state, conservative, anti-tax group put upwards to $11 million into the effort to fight tax hikes in California. Immediately left-leaning groups cried foul and state authorities filed all sorts of charges against the political spending trying to force the group to disclose donors. Now that case has been settled and on terms favorable to the conservative group.
Huffington Post has a pretty dishonest post about some off color anti-Hillary Clinton buttons that were being sold at the California Republican convention this month. The button is being called “disgusting” by HuffyPost, but also seems to blame the state party for them being made. This is just dishonest.
Proving once again that the Democrat Party is the “more loving” and “more caring” Party, a Democrat Party official in California told a female Republican operative who opposes Obamacare that he hoped her children would “all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases.”
California already has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation and if the state’s extremist Democrats get their way, they are going to make those laws even harder on law abiding citizens.
Hugo Schwyzer, a Pasadena City College professor who made a name for himself as a “male feminist,” went on a tear on Twitter admitting that he has no qualifications to be a teacher, that he’s had affairs an his wife with a 23-year-old woman, that he involved himself in inappropriate Internet exchanges à la Anthony Weiner and that he is a “p*ss poor feminist.”
We all, individuals and businesses alike, have this basic assumption that when we put our money in a bank it is safe. But is it? Apparently not so much as the experience of small business TRC indicates when hackers reached into the company’s California-based bank account and drained it of nearly $300 thousand. Worse, the bank and CEO Dennis R. Woods is claiming no responsibility for the security in their own bank!
The police department in Antioch, California is so short handed it has taken the unusual step of asking mail carriers and garbage men to help them fight crime by becoming their eyes and ears on the street.
Democrat State Senator Kevin De Leon has introduced a plan to hike cigarette taxes (
For the extreme left, hydraulic fracturing (known as colloquially as fracking) is the newest bugbear. There are all sorts of false claims about what it “does” to our water and our environment. So, with this anti-fracking crusade crackling along the Internet tubes, most left-wing states are lining up against allowing the natural gas drilling practice to be used within their borders. But Illinois is bucking that left-wing trend.
Earlier this year L.A. teacher Robert Pimentel, 57, was arrested accused by several students and one other teacher of sexual misconduct, but now documents seem to prove that L.A. Unified School District officials knew of allegations of sexual misconduct involving Pimentel going as far back as 2009 but took no real action.
There is a confluence of events over the last few weeks that perfectly proves the essential anti-Americanism of the Old Media establishment in this country today. It is evinced in two separate stories, one wheret the left is excoriating the Koch brothers for wanting to buy the L.A. Times and a contrasting story where journalists are falling all over themselves to get hired by the new news network being started by Al Jazeera, the jihad-supporting, anti-American, Muslim-owned news agency.
The State of California has one of the worst proposals of any legislature in the country this year with a new bill that would force every restaurant and food service business in the state to commission an expensive “risk assessment” test for every menu item, a test that could cost thousands of dollars for every food item sold. This outrageous and cost prohibitive testing would certainly cause all but the biggest chain restaurants to go out of business almost instantly.
A Marine Corporal from Santa Rosa, California, has been arrested and charged with 
Pamela Geller and the American Freedom Defense Initiative have launched a new series of bus ads, this time in San Francisco, California, and the results in the media are typical of the distortions constantly thrown at Geller and her ad campaigns.
Even as the state of California is drowning in debt and already suffering under an avalanche of unfunded mandates, a powerful healthcare advocacy group in the Golden State is pushing for free healthcare for all illegal aliens.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) had a dire prediction for America due to sequestration claiming that 170 million jobs would be lost as a result of the policy. But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are only about 140 million jobs in the whole country.
California Senator Diane Feinstein appeared on Pier Morgan’s evening CNN show on February 28 to talk about her gun-banning bill that is currently on hold in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The interview ended in a gushing mutual admiration society as gun-banner Feinstein applauded gun-hater Morgan and vice versa.
The biggest union news this month is the 
Sandy Banks of the L.A. Times has figured out why anyone would vote against Barack Obama. Why, they are all racists, of course. Oh, you don’t use “the N word,” she tells us, but we know what you Romney voters really think.
Throughout the years Jackie Lacey has quietly perpetrated an easily-documented battle with the truth, earning the career administrator significant and sizable rewards both personal and political.
California Democrat Party Chairman John Burton is setting the Democrat National Convention off on the sort of demagogic footing that has characterized the Democrat’s campaign this year by accusing Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan of being like Nazis, specifically Nazi official Joseph Goebbels.
Early in July extreme left-wing Mother Jones magazine published a 
California’s Attorney General, Democrat Kamala Harris, has weighed in on the side of an immigrant who is asking the State Supreme Court to award him a California law license after his graduation from law school despite that he’s neither a legal resident nor a naturalized citizen of the United States of America.
At first blush, the idea of having ballot initiatives on election day seems like such a great, democratic idea. Unfortunately, all too often, all they are is a way to enlarge government, chip away at freedom, and cost the taxpayers money without returning the benefits promised. California is the perfect example of these troubles.