Texas Cigarette Tax boon for Mexico
MySA.com: Smokers roll with tax
Texas’ new cigarette tax doesn’t exactly have smokers rolling on the floor laughing, but it does have them rolling.
Two weeks into the new tax, retailers have made a curious observation, smokers are rolling their own cigarettes to save money.
Smokers, it seems, have discovered it’s cheaper to smoke ‘em, if you roll ‘em.
“Something they pay $4.70 or $5 a pack, they can roll their own for about $2.25 to $2.50,” said Stacy Rumbo, the manager at The Humidor.
More and more of her customers are asking for cigarette making machines, she said.
“We’re finding a lot of people are ready to learn the art of it before paying the higher price at supermarket,” Rumbo said.
Right now, she’s completely sold out, but not for long. She’s ordered a dozen machines and most of those are already reserved.
“The machines that I have take these premiere tubes. You load them on the machine, load tobacco and it slides tobacco inside, essentially, an empty cigarette,” Rumbo said.
A smaller cigarette roller, takes a bit longer but in the end, but in end you get the same thing — a cheaper cigarette.
The machines cost $15 and up.
I thought this was really funny. What a great way to not pay an outrageous tax. I’m a smoker, I know it’s not a big surprise that an additional dollar per pack tax annoys me, but I know myself and it would bother me if I was a smoker or not. I am never fond of taxing just to tax or “sin taxes” at all. If a tax must be levied then it should be used for a specific purpose that the payers of the tax have something to do with.
As a smoker, I know many other smokers and I have been asking them lately what they are doing about the
new tax. You know, not a single one of us has paid it. I am buying my cigarettes from an Indian reservation, I have a friend who is buying hers, and several of her friends, from the px, and another who is in Laredo several times a month and goes into Mexico and buys them for herself and others. Of my husbands friends most are using the Mexico route since you can bring 5 cartons into the United States with no taxes. That spells a loss to Texas because we were all, maybe not happily, paying about $5 a carton to the state in previous years. I suppose since it only takes 1 now to cover 3 before they might not see it but I am absolutely sure that the Mexican border towns are loving it as are the Indian reservations. I would have to wonder if a booming economy for the Mexican border towns was really what the legislature was going for because that certainly has been the result.
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Filed under: Mexico, excise tax, smoking, texas, texas border, tobacco
