Well, it's today, and State Treasurer, Andy Dillon apparently hasn't received his appointees 'How can we help you succeed and how can we get out of your way' message from the Governor's Office.

Every day in a dozen or so Metro Detroit smoke shops from Westland to Waterford, tax-weary, recession-wracked smokers create their own cartons of cigarettes for half the $60 they'd pay for manufactured name brand smokes.

Thanks to a $30,000 automated roll-your-own machine from an Ohio manufacturer and a bargain tax rate on pipe tobacco created by Congress, smokers can take a box of pre-made cigarette tubes, 8 ounces of tobacco and 15 minutes to produce a carton of freshly rolled cigarettes for under $30 -- less than just the federal and state tobacco taxes they would pay for a pre-made carton.

In March, the Michigan Department of the Treasury warned 300 smoke shop owners that using the machine on their premises constitutes the illegal manufacture of cigarettes. That follows a similar federal ruling, which has been stayed by a restraining order filed by the machine manufacturer, RYO Machine Rental LLC of Girard, Ohio.

So, in Michigan, a private citizen purchases his own legally sold tobacco, his own less harmful FSC free tubes (FSC, yet another intrusive government disaster) both legally sold with tax, and goes over to use a machine to roll his own cigarettes, just to have Tax Sheriff Dillon walk into that legal business and say, "Freeze!  Slowly put your smokes down.  Now hand over money that isn't mine or we'll shut this legal busines down."

Governor Snyder, what happened to the pertinent part of that 'It's time for bureaucracy to go away.  It's been with us a hundred-plus years.  It doesn't work.  It is time for a new model.  It is time for customer service government.  The role of government is to treat you, the citizen, as the customer' philosophy?  Where is this Dillon tactic of threatening a business that provides sale of a product and use of equipment fall anywhere near said business being within the guidelines of a manufacturer when it's a private individual making their own product?

It's just amazing at how money grubbing the Lansing elite can behave from when a then candidate Snyder said, "Government is not qualified nor competent to pick winners and losers".  Even though I did not vote for Snyder in either the primary or general election, I never in my wildest imagination thought that a now Governor Snyder appears to be walking away from that equally applying to citizens, and over such minor but very divisive issues.

But, it is fact.  It's all about what is decided a winner or loser and how much money can be extracted from those who freely use a legal product.

Kyle's father, Norman Mio, worked in wholesale tobacco and saw an opportunity when Congress hiked the excise tax on roll-your-own cigarette tobacco to $24.78 a pound. The tax on pipe tobacco, however, is a mere $2.38 a pound. What's more, industry experts say, the official definition of pipe tobacco is loose enough that anything labeled pipe tobacco gets the lower tax rate.

So, while federal tax is $1.01 on a pack of cigarettes, with another $2 added by the state, a smoker who rolls his cigarettes with "pipe tobacco" pays about 25 cents in excise taxes.

There you have it.  When the truth is written, it's an approximate 50% what the Feds collect, or $2.00 tax collected by the State of Michigan on every pack sold of "actual manufactured" cigarette sold considered a loss of revenue, and without remorse, the state will shut down a competing mom-n-pops legal enterprise within justifying its coffer hungry strong-arm needs.

"I was working as a wholesaler, and we saw a 100 percent increase in sales of roll-your-own tobacco," Norman Mio said. "I figured there's potential selling to people who want to save money by rolling their own."

He isn't the only one to spot the difference. According to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the amount of roll-your-own cigarette tobacco produced in 2010 dropped by 14.6 million pounds from 2008, while the amount of pipe tobacco produced has increased by 17.3 million pounds. The difference in lost tax revenue would total more than $321 million.

Like I wrote, it's amazing how when government attempts to implement a misguided sin tax on 'evil smokers' of a legal product loaded up the ying-yang with paying for others in the lengths that government will go to strangle what was once an everyday unnoticed business.

The all around schizophrenic nature of this Snyder administration is more than a little disappointing when basically it's mantra all along has been about "reinventing Michigan".  It only further leads me to ask...