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by Renegade
on Tue Jul 14, 2009 1:21 am |
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| Has anyone ever tried to bring any lawsuits on the state or federal governments for violating the civil rights of smokers? The reason I ask is that I am a smoker living in Colorado, and the taxes keep going up on cigarettes and tobacco products very quickly. How does this happen when I have never seen any ballots on smoking taxes nor voted on any? How can they tax us without a vote? Isn't that taxation without representation? And isn't taxing smokers for smoking and not taxing non-smokers a discriminatory tax? That is discrimination isn't it? That's a violation of our civil rights, correct? Can anyone help me out here? |
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Renegade
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Joined: Jul 14, 2009
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by Slearwig
on Tue Jul 14, 2009 4:54 am |
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Unequal taxation shouldn't even be a vote. Why let the majority of non-smokers decide that we pay excessive taxes on our pastime?
As for special taxes, they started a long time ago in order to pay for ashtrays and clean up, you know, the litter part that the antis now use as an excuse to prohibit smoking altogether.
It is only in the last twenty years that we see special taxes put on tobacco for unrelated expenses like SCHIP. Normally, special taxes only go to the expense of the specific activity, like gas tax for road construction and maintenance, or ashtrays for tobacco taxes.
I'd love to hear that somebody responsible is challenging these taxes, however, you should know that often there are straw men posing such arguments in court in order to defeat the possibility of any meaningful reversals in the law. They deliberately argue "their case" poorly in order to direct a judicial decision against "their case" in order to shut down access by others to the courts by creating a pre-existent judicial determination against the cause. They've done this in Los Angeles, though in the past, in cases unrelated to tobacco. |
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Slearwig
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Joined: Mar 28, 2009
Posts: 212
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