Sin taxes. Just saying it out loud makes it sound a bit sleazy, but even after a hundred years as a legislative layup; sin taxes remain a politician’s favorite low-hanging fruit – an easy fix, sure to offend the least number of people. Only sinners complain about sin taxes, right?

Smoking, drinking, gambling, and just about any ‘sinful’ activity in which adults legally engage can be regulated and taxed, and often to the people’s benefit. The repeal of Prohibition comes to mind. The eighteenth amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1920, was supposed to make America a more sober, God-fearing nation by outlawing the consumption of alcohol.

Demon Rum, however, had other ideas. Not only did Prohibition fail to stop the flow of liquor, it wasted millions in taxpayer dollars on futile enforcement efforts, and gave rise to an entirely new class of American criminal: the gangster / bootlegger. Without Prohibition there would have been no Al Capone, no Elliot Ness, and no Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Once the federal government figured out that you can’t stop people from drinking, no matter what — and worse, that trying to stop them costs a lot of money, they repealed that nonsense in 1933 and came to the logical, inescapable conclusion that if you can’t stop it — tax it instead.

That decision led to money flowing back into government coffers, and eventually, some historians say, to the end of the Great Depression.

Fast forward to 2013, and the popularity of sin taxes rises again from the ashes — at least here in Philadelphia.

To save the school district from financial calamity, Mayor Nutter, with the blessing of School Superintendent William Hite, has proposed an additional two dollars per pack tax on cigarettes, and another 10 percent tax on liquor by the drink — in addition to the 10 percent drinkers already pay for the same purpose.

In Philadelphia, that would bring the price of a pack of smokes to somewhere between $8 and $10, and slap as much as a $1.50 onto the tab for your overpriced martini. That’s part of the reason I don’t particularly like sin taxes. They tend to discourage the sinful activity and defeat their own purpose.

Oh, I know the anti-smoking and temperance advocates will enjoy it immensely — almost as much as they enjoy piously chastising their less Puritan friends and family members about the evils of everything they consider fun. But you can’t tax sin into non-existence. You can only tax it underground.

Sure, a whopping tax on cigarettes in Philadelphia sounds great until you realize that all you’ve done is drive the smokers elsewhere – probably Delaware or Maryland, or even New Jersey — to get their cancer sticks a lot cheaper. They simply won’t buy them here, and all that expected revenue ends up across the bridge or south on I 95.

Same with liquor by the drink taxes — you just forced more people to stop drinking in bars and take their liquor (also purchased out of state, by the way) home with them to drink tax free.

And like the bad old days of Prohibition, you also open the door to the possibility of bootleggers and speakeasies, funding an underground economy that breeds a new class of criminal and steals even more money from the poor.

There’s also the 400-pound gorilla in the room — the state legislature and the governor. Even if Philly’s sin taxes are enacted, the expected money from the city to the school district is less than half the amount needed for the state to kick in. If the last year or two with Gov. Corbett and the GOP legislature has taught us anything, it’s that money from the state for anything that could possibly benefit Philadelphia is not forthcoming. And if that’s the case, the schools would still be left in the exact same position, city officials would have squandered whatever goodwill they have left, and our cigarette tax money went to Delaware for nothing.

Remember how the Parking Authority was going to contribute millions to the school district? Remember the purpose of the first liquor by the drink tax? That’s right. It was all in the name of education. How much of that money ever make it into the classrooms? How many books and nurses and classroom aides were we able to buy with it?

And if you answer those questions honestly, try this one: What makes you think this new tax money is going to be any different?

Daryl Gale is the city editor of The Philadelphia Tribune.

Since I’m so often referred to as such, I have concluded that I most probably am a cynic.

I’m not sure how I got this way – perhaps the 25 years I’ve spent in the news business has jaded me more than I thought.

I’ve come to embrace my cynicism, and take comfort in the fact that as a cynic, you’re so often right. Take your pick of favorite sayings and axioms preferred by cynics, and it’s hard to argue with the raw truth contained in every word. Like Murphy’s Law, for instance. Or “What goes around comes around,” or our painful truth of the day, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

I thought about that last one while watching the unfolding story of Charles Ramsey, the 43-year old Cleveland resident whose actions were instrumental in saving three women who were held captive by a trio of sickos for ten years.

Ramsey, as you’ve probably seen by now if you own a television or a computer, is one colorful character. His interview with local media following his heroic exploits was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and he became an Internet sensation.

But as I watched the Ramsey bandwagon take off, I also felt a little sorry for him, knowing that at least part of the public interest in him is borne of the fact that he has a look and speech pattern some would consider buffoonish. A Black man with wild hair, missing teeth, a dirty t-shirt, and a vocabulary full of Ebonics add up to entertainment in today’s world of closet racists, giggling in satisfaction because “those people” are so easily ridiculed.

Same thing happened last year to a woman named Sweet Brown, whose phrase, “Ain’t nobody got time for that,” uttered to a local news station became the Internet’s Laugh of the Day.

But it wasn’t just the snickering ridicule that bothered me about Ramsey — it was the knowledge that any minute the other shoe would drop and he’d go from hero to goat in an instant.

This happened the very next day.

My colleagues in the media, bless their narrow-minded little empty hearts, couldn’t wait to dig up some dirt on Ramsey, and found it in the form of three decades-old convictions for domestic violence, which they gleefully trumpeted in a predictable effort to knock him off the pedestal they had just put him on.

What do Ramsey’s prior convictions have to do with his actions on that day he kicked in a door, called 911 and saved those poor women? Nothing. It’s just the price you pay for being famous, even by accident, and even for 15 minutes.

About a month ago a young man named Bernard Scott was tragically shot and killed in a playground across the street from Overbrook High School. After the shooting, a Good Samaritan named Antoine Gardner stopped, loaded the critically injured young man in his car, and drove like a bat out of hell to the nearest hospital.

Later, Gardner cried real tears of regret and anguish that he didn’t make it to the emergency room in time to save Scott’s life. He actually blamed himself in television news interviews, wishing he’d driven faster. It was heartbreaking to watch — but not as heartbreaking as what happened the next day, when it was reported that Gardner himself owed the city thousands of dollars in unpaid back taxes. Like Ramsey in Cleveland, the irrelevant facts of Gardner’s past transgressions were used to somehow mitigate his present heroism. It’s weak, it’s wrong, and I believe it’s tinged with a splash of racism, since I can’t think of any white heroes similarly treated.

This is a pattern here folks, and it makes no sense. If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s not to stick your neck out for anyone or you’ll be sorry. You want people to get involved, to look out for their neighbor and become their brother’s keeper, but it’s hard to convince them of that when they end up being the big loser. Gardner could have kept driving, like dozens of motorists who must have passed the scene. Ramsey could have kept eating his McDonald’s burger and ignored the woman’s screams. They didn’t, and their reward was a public airing of their dirty laundry.

This could have a chilling effect on the next person who decides to selflessly get involved to help a stranger in need.

For sure, it adds a few more cynics to our ever-growing club.

Daryl Gale is the city editor of The Philadelphia Tribune.

I admit that I have had something of a tense relationship with Tom Corbett, our governor.

From letting his friends and contributors in Big Gas and Oil get away with draining the state’s natural gas resources without hitting them with fees and taxes, to enjoying free vacations and weekend getaways courtesy of those same big money contributors, to his gleeful adoption of the outright racist Voter ID law, life with Corbett for the past couple of years has been one boneheaded gaffe after another.

He famously said during the 2010 campaign that many jobless people “are just going to sit there” and not look for work until their unemployment benefits run out. He believed, and for all I know still believes to this day, that the majority of unemployed Pennsylvanians are just too lazy to get off the couch. Worse, there’s that added bit of arrogance that suggests that only after being cut off from the public dole will these layabouts even venture outside to look for work.

And now, just this week, our boy has decided that since his mouth is still open, he might as well insert the other foot. Corbett told a radio audience on Monday that Pennsylvania’s economy is lagging behind other states, particularly in the area of unemployment, because our unemployed are also habitual drug users.

Corbett said, “There are many employers that say, you know, we are looking for people, but we can’t find anybody that has passed a drug test — a lot of them — and that’s a concern for me because we’re having a serious problem with that.”

Hard to believe that level of stupidity even exists, but he said it out loud, and into a microphone. Does the man honestly think that thousands of jobs go unfilled because there’s no unemployed person who can pass a urine test? Apparently so, although neither he nor his aides have come up with a single viable statistic or poll that bears him out.

But it does fit with a certain narrative that I’m betting runs through his tiny brain. Remember the Philadelphia Magazine debacle last month, when they ran the ridiculous cover story, “Being White in Philly?” You’ll recall a major point of controversy was a statement made by one of the racist residents interviewed for the article, who opined that the majority of Philadelphia’s Black people just sit on their porches all day smoking dope.

Unemployed, uneducated, and can’t pass a drug test, so they just sit there all day smoking weed and letting hard-working taxpayers foot the bill for their laziness. That’s the mindset, folks, and that’s what the lady quoted in the Philly mag article, and Gov. Corbett, believe in their heart of hearts.

Never mind the real statistics of the thousands of unemployed Pennsylvanians who worked all their lives until they were laid off, let go, and downsized in the great economic collapse a couple of years ago. Never mind that many of them have practical experience, training, and college degrees, but still can’t find suitable employment. Ignore all the folks with master’s degrees or even PhDs working at fast food joints and driving taxis.

So where are all these employers who bend the governor’s ear about their empty workplaces, begging to give jobs to the first person who can pass a drug test? Since Monday when Corbett’s words hit the fan, not one has come forward to back him up.

Here are some real numbers: According to the Corpus Christie, Texas-based Caller-Times, in 2011 only 1.8 percent of applicants in federally regulated industries failed the drug tests. And about half of the failing drug tests in the past five years are caused by prescription drugs.

And according to the website Think Progress, Pennsylvania has been running a pilot program in 19 counties where folks seeking public assistance who have past felony narcotics convictions must pass a drug test to get their assistance check. To this day, only two people have failed.

Instead of investing in job creation, education and our crumbling infrastructure, Corbett believes it’s a better idea to invest in making corporate CEOs and shareholders happy, and maybe those happy fat cats will trickle down a few crumbs for the rest of us. Confronted finally with the utter failure of this policy, Corbett chose to rely on his old standby: blame the poor and the powerless.

The gubernatorial election is still a few years away, but the choices are already clear, and as simple as ABC: Anybody But Corbett.

Daryl Gale is the city editor of The Philadelphia Tribune.

This week, my colleagues and I were horrified to read the latest report from CareerCast.com, a group that studies employment and workplace environments. In that report, released earlier this week, the folks at CareerCast rated 200 professions from most desirable to least desirable.

Guess which profession came in dead last, as the least desirable job in the country? Newspaper reporter.

It was a hard pill to swallow, especially for those of us who have spent our entire adult lives doing this job. I mean, really? Below the guy who shovels out the zoo cages? Below septic tank cleaners? Below rat catchers? How about the poor podiatrist’s assistant who spends all day peeling callouses and scraping toenail fungus? Surely being a reporter beats that one, right?

No.

This revelation, I’ll wager, lent itself to a great deal of soul-searching and introspection in newsrooms across the country. I certainly gave it some thought, and came to a rather inconclusive conclusion.

They’re right, and they’re wrong.

Here’s how they’re right: The pay is not nearly as much as those outside the profession believe it is, and not nearly as much as experienced, well-trained reporters deserve. The hours are terrible – I cannot tell you the number of times as a reporter I was required to work long into the night, and in some cases, all night. Even as an editor I seriously doubt that I’ve ever worked less than a 45-to-50 hour week.

The demands are incredible. A reporter is asked to take a subject he or she knows little about, find the experts and professionals to shed light on the subject, then condense all that information into a tightly-written piece that’s understandable, readable, and with any luck, interesting. And they have to do it quickly. This brings us to the fourth downside: stress.

A reporter is asked to do all those things, every day, all while being belittled and degraded by an editor, whose whip-cracking and unreasonable demands for speed increase by the minute. Newspapers invented the term ‘deadline pressure’ – and it’s not just a figure of speech. Deadlines are hard and fast, and missing a deadline can lead to any number of disasters, including costing the paper’s publisher thousands of dollars if a run is missed. I’ve seen it happen, and trust me, heads really do roll.

And finally, let’s be honest here, the newspaper business is not doing well these days. Newsrooms nationwide are cut down to skeleton crews, and layoffs, buyouts, and furloughs are the norm rather than the exception. Even once-great papers like the New Orleans Times-Picayune are cutting production, cutting pages and cutting back from dailies to thrice-weeklies. And if the present state of daily newspapers is not rosy, the future is downright grim.

On the other hand, the folks at CareerCast are dead wrong. Here’s why: Reporters know things, and they know them before anyone else. They get to talk to the experts themselves and dissect a story – breaking down the important elements and asking the questions readers want answered. Just this week alone here at the Tribune I’ve had in-depth, in-person conversations with the mayor, the police commissioner, a ranking state senator, and all their varied lieutenants and assistants. Next week it will be judicial candidates, office seekers in next month’s primary election, and a host of others. Who wouldn’t love to have unfettered access to every newsmaker and elected official in the state and ask anything they want? I’m sorry; CareerCast, but you can’t beat that with a stick.

We also get to understand the issues behind the issues, like the insider political deals that drive the city forward (or backward, as the case may be). Some of this stuff never makes it to print, so the average Joe only knows the outcome, not the motivation. Reporters and editors get the whole story - in all its unfiltered, hideous glory.

There are also some pretty cool unanticipated perks involved. Because of the job, I was able to meet my childhood hero Muhammad Ali a few years ago. I’ve done stories from the Eagles’ locker room, got involved in illegal street racing, attended a Wiccan ceremony, and chronicled the last season of sports at Veteran’s stadium, where I hung out with the grounds crew and the Philly Phanatic.

It may be the worst job in the world, but I’d still take it over being the guy at the zoo with the shovel.

Daryl Gale is the city editor of The Philadelphia Tribune.

One of the great things about working in a newsroom is the level of debate. There are discussions of news topics great and small – from eliminating poverty to illegal guns to Lil’ Wayne’s facial tattoos. Opinions fly, voice levels rise, but more often than not, logic and intelligent discourse rule the day.

The other day there was such a discussion, and it was a doozy. The question on the table was whether President Barack Obama has done enough specifically for Black people, and by the same token, if we Blacks aren’t asking too much of him.

It’s a legitimate discussion, and one that’s taking place every day among Black folks in barber shops, saloons, and beauty parlors around the country. There is ample evidence to suggest that Blacks, about 93 percent of whom voted for Obama in November, have gotten the short end of the stick from the president’s administration. His cabinet picks for his second term are overloaded with white folks – even his predecessor George W. Bush had more African Americans in positions of power than Obama – and it’s difficult to nail down even one occasion when the president acknowledges the unique problems of racial minorities in this country.

When faced with specific questions on race, Obama’s pat answer is, “I’ve got to be everyone’s president, not just one group.” Fair enough, there’s no denying that. But when one group seems to get the shaft over and over, don’t they deserve special relief?

If it’s fine to single out Blacks for, say, stop and frisk purposes, or follow them around department stores, or point to Black people when the subject of entitlements comes up, then it’s equally fair to single them out when talking about relief from discrimination both subtle and overt.

During the course of our discussion, I realized that my problem with the president, whom I admire, respect and voted for twice, is not so much that his policies and initiatives are not pleasing to his fellow Black folks in particular, but that they are not pleasing to his fellow Democrats in general.

Take the gun control legislation that crashed and burned in the Senate this week. It seemed like a no brainer, considering that every poll shows Americans – even gun owners - are overwhelmingly in favor of legislation that keeps guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unfit. The time was right, the political will existed to get it done, and the mood of the country, after the recent shooting massacres, couldn’t be more favorable to some form of gun control.

But the bill that was shot down by the Senate bore little resemblance to tough gun control legislation. That bill had been watered down to just background checks under certain conditions – watered down so much that even Democrats turned up their noses at it.

I think Obama’s negotiating style is to blame. He begins every negotiation by giving up something, and thereby working from a position of weakness. If you start in the center, and your opponents are way out there to the right, the only way to compromise is to move toward them, and further right. They win before the first shot is fired.

It happened in the most recent sequester / fiscal cliff / spending vs. entitlement fiasco. The president immediately put Social Security and Medicare on the table, the two Democrat stronghold issues, for possible cuts. What did the Republicans offer? Zilch. They didn’t have to, because Obama had capitulated already, and was now trying to make up ground he already gave away.

The president, bless his naïve little heart, seems to be laboring under the delusion that he’s dealing with rational, critically-thinking adults who, deep down, really are concerned with the best interests of the country and their constituents.

He isn’t.

He’s dealing with selfish, petty, petulant children who need to be told what to do, and what’s going to happen. Congress needs leadership, in much the same way as a room full of preschoolers.

When Republicans get in power, you’ll notice, that never happens. They come in like gangbusters, ramrod their agenda through intact and undiminished, and leave Democrats standing on the sidelines. They don’t compromise, they don’t negotiate, and they don’t care what you think. It’s all draconian abortion restrictions, discriminatory Voter ID laws, and open hostility toward gays and immigrants from Day One.

Well, I for one am tired of watching my president get hammered because he wants to be the bigger person. Clearly there’s no profit in it. We can’t even get a simple gun bill passed.

It’s your second term, brother. Time to start using those size 11s for something other than walking into a trap.

Daryl Gale is the city editor of The Philadelphia Tribune.