Porn Bailout Request

My Furry Pole Dancer
Originally uploaded by SugarbearSteve

Porn industry lobbyists feel out Capitol Hill in a time of economic crisis.

But in a time of economic crisis, lawmakers are more likely to give the porn industry grief than gratitude. Legislators in California, New York, Florida, Texas, and Washington state recently proposed stemming budget losses through various skin tariffs, ranging from a Magnum-sized 25 percent sales tax on X-rated movies to a $5 "pole tax" on visits to strip clubs.

Thanks to the First Amendment, such measures are usually defeated by little more than gales of laughter. But Diane Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition and the adult industry's only registered national lobbyist, isn't sniggering. "The state of the adult industry is not a joke," Duke tells me. Indeed. Like mainstream-media companies, the producers of pornographic films and magazines are threatened by piracy, and, above all, by free Internet content. In economic terms, porn consumption is "elastic" and thus a poor candidate for raising revenues via taxes: If it costs an extra $5 to rent a smutty DVD, a consumer is likely to stay home and turn off Google's SafeSearch filter.

Ha, today I was searching with safe search off the phrase, tennis tits. I was hoping to see some cleavage and got nothing but porn pics.