Word: alcohol
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This is one reason there's new interest in taxing gas, alcohol, electricity and even trans fats to discourage undesirable behaviors while closing budget gaps. Obama has already hiked taxes on cigarettes and wants to end tax breaks for drilling and offshoring. He seems even more eager to subsidize desirable behaviors like saving, teaching, weatherizing and buying fuel-efficient cars and energy-efficient appliances. Of course, his energy policy goes beyond incentives; he wants a strict national cap on carbon emissions. He has also signaled openness to a national health-insurance mandate. (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008: From...
...established tactic. In the early 1500s, Pope Leo X underwrote his lavish lifestyle in part by taxing licensed prostitutes, and Peter the Great preyed on Russian vanity two centuries later by charging men who grew beards. In the Federalist papers, American patriot Alexander Hamilton proposed an excise tax on alcohol to boost revenues and curb consumption. The measure, enacted in 1791, sparked the Whiskey Rebellion, in which federal authorities were forced to quash an uprising by livid Pennsylvania settlers...
...modern literary tradition—in particular, the Lost Generation writers and their contemporaries—has done something curious in romanticizing the throes of alcoholism. Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald were all raging alcoholics and filled their novels with characters who acted likewise. But never before, and rarely today, does a novelist confront addiction so intimately and personally as Jerzy Pilch in his recently translated novel, “The Mighty Angel.”A darkly humorous, yet undeniably serious, look into the life of a repeatedly relapsing alcoholic (also named Jerzy) and his recovering brethren...
...those who believe - with some good reason - that the accretion of legalized vices is debilitating, that we are a less virtuous society since gambling spilled out from Las Vegas to "riverboats" and state lotteries across the country. There is a medical argument, though not a very convincing one: alcohol is more dangerous in a variety of ways, including the tendency of some drunks to get violent. One could argue that the abuse of McDonald's has a greater potential health-care cost than the abuse of marijuana. (Although it's true that with legalization, those two might not be unrelated...
...ought to be accompanied by Chinese water spinach, cooked in a chili-infused shrimp paste known as belachan. For dessert, go for the sago gula melaka, a mixture of boiled sago, warm coconut milk, palm sugar and shaved ice. The cost of an average dinner for two (without alcohol) is around $50, a modest tariff for food that is invariably sedap. That's Baba Malay for "delicious," and a word that will hopefully live for a long time...