You are the type of person who generally weighs benefits against costs, but the costs usually win. Family and friends never, never, never try to convince you of an alternative point of view, political or otherwise. Today, you are likely to spend a great deal of time calling an endless list of 800 numbers seeking to buy either storage boxes for your summer clothes or 500 feet of coaxial cable. Be on the lookout for deranged pelicans. You should consider shopping at stores or businesses beginning with the letter T, but do not buy any products with a serial number or product code containing the number 047387. Your preferred shopping venue is thrift stores. Your special symbol is the comma (,).

As a Brown Pragmatox, you are down-to-earth and practical. You are hard working and industrious. You are frugal to the point that you might even refrain from making a purchase that you really, really need. Doing so often causes problems down the road. You definitely go with function over form and substance over style.

A change in the allocation of resources caused by placing taxes on economic activity. By creating disincentives to produce, consume, or exchange, taxes generally alter resource allocations. The allocation effect is typically used when governments seek to discourage the production, consumption, or exchange of particular goods or activities that are deemed undesirable (such as tobacco use or pollution). This is one of two effects of taxation. The other (primary) is the revenue effect, which is the generation of revenue used to finance government operations.

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Our pedestrian's jaunt through the economy is not, unfortunately, an unrestrained shopping spree for confectioneries, spark plug tools, and Houston, Texas. We have other important errands to run. At the moment we need to hike over to Shady Valley's exclusive provider of cable television services, the Merciless Monolithic Media Masters Cable Television Company, Inc., to inquire about a mysterious fee that appeared last month's bill.

The good news is that the Merciless Monolithic Media Masters (the 4M people) Cable office is a mere 2 miles (3 kilometers for the metrically inclined) from the Shady Valley Central Town Sprawling Hills Shopping Mall. A hop, skip, and a moderately long jump later, our excursion through the economy takes us to the front door of the 4M Cable Television Company where I hope to discover why last month's cable bill included a $3,569 charge for something called "The Vacation Channel." I didn't even know I had a vacation channel. (But, I'm sure it's a great channel, and if I don't have it, then I will certainly subscribe. Please don't disconnect me.)

Of course, because this an afternoon workday, the doors of the 4M office are locked. I can almost make out, through the expensive stained glass windows, what appears to be several Merciless Monolithic Media Masters Cable Television employees, with champaign bottles in hand, dancing on expensive mahogany desks. Let's not disturb them. As they say in the cable business, an upset worker is a disconnected customer.
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