Comments on the Seneca Indian Nation's Multimillion-Dollar Ad Campaign

ALBANY, NY (11/13/2008)(readMedia)-- James Calvin, President, New York Association of Convenience Stores, today issued the following statement:

Average citizens may need hip boots to wade through the heavily fertilized messages filling the airwaves in defense of New York's insidious cigarette tax evasion epidemic.

Awash in casino and smoke-shop profits, the Seneca Nation of Indians has launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign urging Governor Paterson to veto a bill designed to recover the nearly $1 billion a year in taxes the State is lawfully entitled to collect on the vast quantities of cigarettes and motor fuel the Senecas and other Native American tribes are selling to non-Indian customers.

Calling it "an economic war against the Seneca Nation" - they sure have a flair for the dramatic, don't they? - the tribe is essentially arguing that they should be allowed to play by different rules because they generate $1 billion worth of economic activity and thousands of jobs. "All of this will be undone" if the bill is enacted, the ads warn. Some perspective is in order.

First, all New Yorkers respect the Senecas' right to self-govern and to operate commercial enterprises, and genuinely appreciate their impressive economic significance. They likewise value the presence of IBM, General Electric, Kodak, and other Fortune 500 companies. Being an economic force, however, does not excuse any entity from abiding by duly enacted standards for conducting commerce with New Yorkers - and that includes taxation of non-Indian customers pursuant to state law and a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Second, their three casinos generate most of the economic activity the Senecas boast of. With all due respect to them, if the Man in the Moon had instead been granted the exclusive, no-bid franchise to operate gambling casinos in Western New York, arguably he would now be contributing $1 billion annually to the region's economy. The rights to these gaming facilities were bestowed by the State of New York and the U.S. Department of the Interior. The Senecas did not organically spawn them.

As for jeopardizing 6,300 jobs, as the Senecas claim, the vast majority of those are casino jobs unaffected by the cigarette tax contrioversy. If the State collected taxes the way it's supposed to, cigarette retailing jobs would not evaporate. Rather, they would return to the tax-collecting side of the street, where they existed before cigarette tax evasion exploded in the 1990's under George Pataki. In fact, a respected economist determined in 2004 that uniform enforcement of the cigarette excise tax in New York would yield a net increase of at least 1,300 jobs (see www.nyacs.org/documents/OConnorjobsstudy2004.pdf).

I think most fair-minded citizens would agree that if you contribute $1 billion a year to New York's economy, but stand in the way of the State collecting $1 billion a year in legitimate tax revenue it desperately needs, then your net economic impact on New York State is zero.