Well here’s a fascinating twist of taxation fate.  From today’s Washington Post:

Cigarette sales have dropped by nearly 25 percent in Maryland since the state’s tobacco tax doubled in January, as sticker shock apparently has curtailed some residents’ smoking and sent others across the border for better deals.

Maryland lawmakers voted last fall to raise the tax to $2 a pack to help bridge a budget shortfall and expand subsidized health care. Fiscal analysts predicted that the new rate, the sixth highest in the nation, would cause cigarette sales to drop off, following a pattern with past increases.

But the decline during the first six months of the year significantly exceeded their projections, exacerbating Maryland’s budget problems and prompting speculation about what other factors might be at play. The tight economy, for example, has almost certainly added incentive for some to kick the habit.

Still, “it’s unlikely that this is exclusively because of an abrupt cessation of smoking on the part of Marylanders,” said House Majority Leader Kumar P. Barve (D-Montgomery), who suggested that people are probably picking up extra packs of cigarettes when they are in the District, Virginia or Delaware, all of which have lower tax rates.

So in addition to a Surgeon General warning, should cigarette packs now have a warning from the Comptroller: “Excessive taxation is hazardous to your financial health”?

High fives throughout the glass-enclosed nerve center of Extreme Mortman today.

Why? We eagerly read the new “Political Junkie” column by Ken Rudin, which we always do, and saw that he listed incumbent senators who have been defeated for renomination — an Extreme Trivia question we asked, what, AGES AGO!

But Ken does have something we didn’t: this button from the last time an incumbent Senator lost a primary — Illinois’ Alan Dixon 1992 to Carol Moseley Braun.

Meanwhile, we’ve still got the latest Extreme Trivia question — name the last incumbent Republican to lose a Senate primary — unsolved. To those who keep saying Jacob Javits: STOP ALREADY. He’s not the most recent.

But I do want to recognize Herb Wachs, the great wise scholar from Reading, Pennsylvania who doubles as my father-in-law, for sending this note:

There are very many Republican Senators in the PA Senate who lost
reelection bids this year. The PA legislature voted themselves big pay raises in a middle of the night budget session last year. The voters were outraged. Many Republican incumbents were defeated in primaries in PA. So if you expand your question to PA politics, there are a lot of Republican Senators who were defeated in PA in 2006.

How true.

I noticed on my tax accountant’s desk today a huge, hulking publication called “Hurricane Tax Relief Acts of 2005.” Hundreds and hundreds of pages of rules and regulations. Which got me thinking — boy, if they only used that thing to plug up the levees.