I made the mistake of listening to the radio again the other day.

There was a guest on the George Hook show (suggested motto: “As intelligent as he is attractive!”) touting a book of suggestions for turning the economy around. I came in near the end of the conversation and heard the last point about duty on cigarettes and the evasion thereof, by…. well almost everybody.

The guest had a huge bee in his bonnet about all the lovely dosh not being forked over to the government, who would only spend it wisely I’m sure, by all the degenerate bloody smokers buying untaxed cigarettes. His solution? Simply force the cigarette manufacturers to institute a tracking system on each pack of cigarettes. This way each pack can be tracked, and if found without the proper tax stamp the VAT can be charged back to the company, who’ll recover it from whoever they sold the cigarettes to. Simple.

The first thought that popped into my mind was that this would increase the price of every pack further and make theft of taxed cigarettes more attractive. You’d increase the price for legal consumers while increasing the danger for legal shippers. It’s a two-fer! My second thought, which I’m sure would never have occurred to this paragon of imaginative financial solutions, was that you might raise more tax revenue and hurt the black market by lowering the duty on cigarettes. However, that will never happen because cigarettes are evil, nasty, and make all “good” people weep with sorrow. The government doesn’t want people to buy more cigarettes, but they by God don’t want to lose the tax revenue.

After turning off the radio it took ages to clean the inside of my windshield of all the blood that shot out of my eyes while listening to that tripe.