BUTT RUNNING
Remember reading about when the days and nights when “Rum Running" made the headlines?
There have been several times in our national history when it became profitable to move quantities of spiritus frumenti from one location to another and it proved especially profitable if one could effect the exchange without the payment of taxes normally associated with such a transaction.
It is closely akin to “smuggling” in a very real sense and remarkably ingenious schemes have been worked out in detail by some really talented individuals to bring about such mercantile movements in order to increase one's wealth appreciably.
Rum Running was literally the running of the product rum - and kindred brews - either from the place of manufacturer or from stocks secreted at various locations “over the waters”. The concept is not new, yet it is not “old” either. We still have rum running , now blottered as “bootlegging”, a designation it picked up during the era of national prohibition. Some police jurisdictions have regular offenders ....entire families, as a matter of fact, who still insist on running a car full of plastic milk containers with their home-made brew contained therein to metro districts for SWAT - “Sales Without Any Taxes”
Our current problem in Virginia, however, is not rum running. Today it is the clandestine movement of ever increasing stocks of Virginia cigarettes north on Interstate 81 and Interstate 95. This has come to be a viable but illegal “business” largely because New York and Connecticutt have a tax of $l.50 on a pack of cigarettes and Virginia has such a tax set at 2.5-cents per pack. I have seen it estimated that one can load up a semi and realize a profit of around $25,000 per load. Run four trucks and get rich.
I have heard this bogus business called: “Butt Running” and those persons engaged in it speak of each other as “Kicking butt up I-81 or I-95!”
Dreamers and others who think there is an easy solution to this growing problem, ask why we allow it to continue. No legislator, including the ones I voted for and will continue to vote for, wants to touch the problem with a the proverbial ten foot - or longer - pole. Tobacco farming is a major crop in Virginia, tobacco processing is a major industry - domestic and foreign, as well - and the industry supports the government and, as good back scratching technique goes, the government, then, supports the industry. Simple logic.
Right now, with stringent budget cuts being made Virginia and with more on the way, many critics are saying: “Up the cigarette tax!” Some are yelling the suggestion and I have been amazed at the verbal dexterity with which some of my favorite political persons have gracefully sidestepped the mire for the moment.
A compromise of some sort?
Maybe later, when the New Year is here, but as for right now - not a chance! Any bill to raise the “sin tax” on cigs would melt away into nothingness before it hit the floor. I would sooner place my wager on the celebrated “snowball in Hell” premise
December 9, 2002 [c529wds]
