It’s because there is not enough tariffs in place.
If an artist is using their grant money on booze and art supplies, the government will get a fair bit of the money back through taxes. If the artist does drugs instead, the government is missing out. The obvious choice would be to start taxing all narcotics and intoxicants.
(God I hope the /s isn’t necessary)
to contextualise : eggs aren’t just food, they could also contain various animals that could distrupt the ecosystem, hence why they were smuggled before, why border cops are looking for them, etc.
But, most of them are just food, because we would never have this uptick in smuggling otherwise.
And we’re signaling border officials to throw away all of that food, as if we didn’t waste enough food in this county.
hey could also contain various animals that could distrupt the ecosystem,
The only thing that an egg that someone is likely smuggling in is going to contain is a chicken, and we’re also currently short of the egg-laying variants of chickens, so a black-market Canuck egg-laying chicken wouldn’t go amiss either.
The only thing that an egg that someone is likely smuggling in is going to contain is a chicken
and you personally can tell apart chicken eggs from rare lizard eggs or any other egg that might be a similar size to a chicken egg?
Just about the only hard shelled reptile eggs are crocodilian, some turtles, and a few outliers like some geckos. Very few of any of those would be confused with chicken eggs. There also are (hopefully still) wildlife experts as part of border patrol who can and do make those determinations.
That said, there are endangered bird and reptile species that we don’t want trafficked and smuggled eggs get rescued by animal control portions of border security unfortunately all the time and they should keep doing their job.
CBP intercepted egg products on 3,254 occasions this January and February, compared to 1,508 occasions in the first two months of 2024.
TIL that people were “smuggling” eggs across the border last year as well. I wonder what the earlier historical numbers have been - there had to be some historical number of border residents doing it in their periodic cross-border visits, and unknowing vacationers who bought a dozen or two to cook while they’re camping and just brought the remainder home.
Let’s try smuggling Kinder Surprise eggs instead, maybe that will relieve the tension.
