Guys at the Bada-Bing must LOVE S.C. lawmakers

As part of my never-ending quest to be fair-minded and see the silver lining, I've managed to think of one group of citizens who will benefit from, and have reason to appreciate, the otherwise contemptible, ridiculous failure of the S.C. House to override Mark Sanford's veto of the cigarette tax increase. They're not citizens of S.C. (and come to think of it, Furio's not even a citizen of this country), but let's not get picky.

In case you haven't done the math on this, the S.C. tax on cigarettes is 7 cents (yes, 7 cents) a pack. In New York City, it's $4.25 a pack. Imagine the profit on a truckload of cartons, even if you don't steal the truck. As if I-95 needed MORE traffic...

The Wall Street Journal recently explained the profitability to O.C. of the New York taxes. Of course, being the WSJ -- the only publication in the world that actually believes Mark Sanford is a contender for John McCain's running mate (and even then it's just the ideologues on the editorial board) -- was arguing that the N.Y. tax was a bad thing.

    While the problem first surfaced during the Great Depression, tax hikes in the early 1960s created a major profit opportunity for smugglers and kicked the epidemic into high gear. By 1967, a quarter of the cigarettes consumed in the Empire State were bootlegged. New York City's finance administrator labeled cigarette smuggling the "principal stoking facility of the engine of organized crime."

    Crime rapidly spread beyond New York's borders, as trucks carrying cigarettes across the country were hijacked and businesses selling them robbed to supply New York's black market. In 1972, the chairman of a New York commission told Congress that retailers and other workers were "confronted almost daily with the risk and dangers of personal violence which are now inherent in their industry."

But from a South Carolina perspective, what that math says is that we could stop that traffic from coming out of our state -- but only if we were willing to raise the tax by several times the lousy 50 cents we were talking about. But being South Carolina, and having our Legislature and our governor, we couldn't even manage that, which is of course beneath pitiful.

I should add that the WSJ piece also dealt with the connection between cigarette smuggling and terrorism. But thanks to South Carolina, ordinary decent American criminals are in a position to keep competing with the foreign bad guys.