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Jun

16

The Drink Pittsburgh Drink Tax Sucks… Wealth

June 16, 2008 |

The local 10% Allegheny County drink tax brouhaha has made national headlines, with The Associated Press publishing an article [Drink tax makes Pa. County executive unpopular] that was featured on the Drudge Report, the web’s most popular news headline aggregation site.

We’ve not weighed in on the subject given its pretty obvious where we stand on the issue: the local political machine is too wimpy to cut its bloated budget and thus offend its strongest activist voting block: the unions feeding from the taxpayer trough.

Never mind the country is slipping into a recession and most every private sector worker is forced to accept the reality that the old gravy days of union power have given way to fiscal reality.

Never mind that the bloated deals made post World War II when all U.S. competition was devastated came back to haunt U.S. consumers who could no longer afford to buy what was made in the U.S. — nor did Unions seem to care to given the quality had sunk to pathetic lows, exacerbated by management stupidity that actually bet on “planned obsolescence” (think: your car breaks early and often) so consumers would have to keep fixing and buying.

Nope. There’s a clear line drawn between the real world and basic economic gravity, and politics and government.   Both pretend not a whole lot has changed, and short of a taxpayer revolution, you can expect they’ll tax, tax, tax… and then tax some more, pitting this group against that — to keep their power and wealth flow intact.

Hence, our view is that the drink tax is an act of cowardice and political opportunism.  Instead, the region needs to cut the budget — one of the most bloated per citizen of any region in the United States.


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