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Originally Posted by Xenophon
My favorite of the PA state surcharges is the 33% emergency tax originally levied to pay for cleaning up the Great Pittsburgh Flood of... wait for it... 1933. Not only are Pennsylvanians still paying that "emergency" tax, it's levied on top of all the other federal and state liquor taxes... except, of course, for the state sales tax which is calculated as 1.06x(total-bill-after-all-other-taxes-have-been-applied). Some counties have additional sales tax increments above the state's 6%, so in Pittsburgh, for example, that's actually 1.07x.
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<chuckle> Once imposed, taxes don't go away without dynamite.
There's a reason for the healthy smuggling trade between PA and neighboring DE and NJ...
(NY is also fun like that. I chap I corresponded with elsewhere lives in an area where there are three separate local tax jurisdictions around him, with different rules on what is taxed and how much. He plans his shopping based on where items have lowest taxes. When I said that counting in his time, wear and tear on his car, and cost of gas, he might actually be spending
more money overall on his purchases, he agreed, but just didn't like taxes and was willing to spend the extra time and money to avoid them.)
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Actually it's still illegal to sell beer in supermarkets. The local supermarkets have a legal hack around that, however. They open a "cafe" that serves prepared food and seats at least [however-many-people-required-by-law], so they can get a license to sell beer in their restaurant (both for consumption in the cafe portion of the store, and to go). To serve wine legally, they'd need more seats, and a larger menu, but would not be permitted to sell it to go.
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Okay, thanks. I haven't been back to Philly save for brief visits in decades, so I was relying on fallible memory.
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And a very few—under 10 last I heard—supermarkets have a special "experimental" deal with the State Liquor Control Board allowing them to sell wine and beer from the supermarket. It's an experiment to make sure that nothing bad happens as a consequence. [Because the experience of the majority of the country outside PA couldn't possibly be relevant to what could happen in PA, of course!]
[BIG SNIP]
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That sounds typical of just about anyplace. I'm sure you can find similar idiocy elsewhere. Things like that are part of what I think of as formal culture, and change
very slowly.
PA does seem to be highly ranked in political corruption. An old friend once claimed the PA State Highway Department was the second largest source of political patronage jobs in the country, behind only the federal government, and you could tell which counties had good pull in Harrisburg, the state capitol, by how well the roads were maintained. I could easily believe it.
One of the historical personages in PA was a chap named Matthew Quay, who could have given NYC's infamous Boss Tweed lessons in machine politics. He was once refused a seat in the US Senate as a Republican candidate for being too corrupt for even that body. He coined the phrase "Politics consists of taking the votes from the many and the money from the few, under the guise of protecting each from the other".
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Dennis