re: Dividend stocks and DRIPs as a long term investment vehicle

Not really bc now they learned their lesson from Altria. When the US won the tobacco master settlement and forced altria to pay a fortune annually, altria spun off kraft, spun off mondelez, spun off philip morris and basically gave the US government a big F U by saying you guys weren't going to come after us for more money once the original master settlement is up so now the big cash cow part of altria, the foreign growth is gone from America's litigation grasp.

If another country brings up a lawsuit, I imagine they'll do the same thing and spin off that company within that particular country. The real growth is coming in the developing parts of the world:Africa,Indonesia,Vietnam. China is a place where they own .3% of the market bc of China Tobacco and 25% of that gigantic population smokes, they're getting in slowly but surely. I really see nothing to derail them, they're doing everything that made americans smoke at a rate of near 50% in the late 1960s, they're going after the youth in all these countries now and nothing is going to stop them. Do you realize the powers that govern these nations with all the population growth and how corrupt their leadership is?

along the way they've bought back no less than $4B a year of their own shares in their 5 years of existence which in the long run will allow for less shares and bigger dividend boosts, this year they will buyback $6B