Helping the Children By Funding Terror

Leave it to the greedy politicians in New York to gouge consumers so relentlessly they fail to stop and realize they're unwittingly helping our enemies. Or maybe they consciously know what they're doing but don't care anyway since they get to spend more taxpayer dough on their pet projects.

If you hadn't heard, on Tuesday New York imposed another $1.25 per pack tax on cigarettes, increasing what already was the highest state tax in the nation. They pretend they're doing this to help prevent the kiddies from picking up the habit. Instead what they're essentially doing is greatly increasing bootlegging, which in effect helps fund terrorism.

It was billed as a day of celebration: New York's $1.25-a-pack cigarette tax hike went into effect on Tuesday, rendering state and city Health Commissioners Richard Daines and Thomas Frieden giddy with anticipation.

State cigarette sales will plummet by 160 million packs a year, they said, and tens of thousands of New York kids won't die prematurely from smoking. Plus, state tax revenue will bulge by a cool $265 million this year.

What's wrong with that?

Well, a rather more jarring perspective comes courtesy of the Richmond, Va., US attorney's office - which this week announced trafficking and money-laundering charges against some of New York's biggest cigarette smugglers.

The indictments - 27 in total - reveal the extent of the underworld nourished by Daines, Frieden & Co.'s naivete.

As part of a 17-month sting operation orchestrated by the state Department of Taxation & Finance, the alleged butt-runners bought more than 260,000 cartons of tax-free smokes in Virginia.

Most were then sold to city retailers, with the smugglers and retailers splitting the $3-a-pack in state and city taxes then levied on cigarettes.

(Even that volume doesn't tell the full story. Thanks to Albany's stubborn refusal to enforce its taxes on Indian reservations, city smugglers have a prime source of product much closer to home: More than 30 million cartons of cigarettes came off the state's reservations last year alone.)

Still more disturbing, however, is where all the money could be going. Officials have long known that domestic buttlegging is an attractive source of funding for al Qaeda, Hezbollah and other terrorist outfits - probably to the tune of millions of dollars a year.

Of course, they'll scoff at this and simply say medical costs in the long run will be reduced because fewer people will smoke, which may be true. Though at the same time smokers will simply go elsewhere for their cigarettes and the state will never realize the pie-in-the-sky estimated tax revenue.

If they wanted to get more tax revenue the smart thing would be to reduce taxes, thereby selling more cigarettes. But New York is run by Democrats, so doing the smart thing is obviously out of the questions