The things I’ll do for this job. Last night, I bought a six-pack of beer in the name of journalism.

Before the folks from accounting come and revoke my expense account, let me explain. The idea of reducing the sales tax charged on groceries has been brought up recently in the Kansas Legislature, but as has been the case every other time the idea has been raised, it has gone nowhere. Kansas has the second highest sales tax on groceries in the country, and that has created an interesting situation: Most Kansas consumers pay less tax for liquor than they do for groceries.

Here’s how that works: When you go to a liquor store in Kansas, you don’t pay a sales tax at all. You pay a special tax called a “liquor enforcement tax.” It is an 8 percent tax. Every liquor store in the state charges it, regardless of its location. No local sales taxes are added to the price of your liquor purchase in a liquor store. In the name of good journalism, I went to the liquor store at 23rd and Harper last night and bought a six-pack of Miller High Life. The purchase price before tax was $4.69 — and I’ll remind the accountants that wasn’t for swill but rather was for The Champagne of Beers. I paid 38 cents in tax. That’s 8 percent.

But if I were to go to a Lawrence grocery store and buy a loaf of bread, or a bag of chips or this foreign substance that my wife keeps talking about called lettuce, I would pay 9.05 percent in sales tax. As I have been known to say before, it pays to buy beer over bread.

This situation isn’t exactly new. The 8 percent liquor enforcement tax has been around for a long time. But it hasn’t been increased since 1983. That’s not the case with state and local sales taxes. In 1983 and for many years afterwards, the 8 percent liquor enforcement tax was consistently higher than the sales tax rate in pretty much every community in the state. But now there are more than 300 jurisdictions in Kansas that have sales tax rates greater than 8 percent. In more densely populated areas, it is by far the norm.

Kansas has 23 cities with a population of 20,000 or more. Of those, 21 cities have sales tax rates greater than 8 percent. Only Wichita and Derby fall at or below the 8 percent mark. The median in Kansas’ largest cities, in case you are wondering, is 9.1 percent.

What does all this mean? That is probably for you to decide. Some may see this as the state sending an odd values message by taxing something that is clearly a luxury — liquor — at a rate that is lower than something that is clearly a necessity, like food. Others may believe the problem isn’t with the liquor tax but rather believe the culprit is general sales taxes have increased too much over the years.

That’s not for me to say. But as the state searches its couch cushions for money, and as communities continue to deal with some issues related to liquor consumption, it seems like it is a conversation worth having.

If such a conversation were to happen — and let me be clear that I’ve seen no signs that it will — cities and counties probably would like to have the conversation broadened a bit. There’s also one other important difference between the liquor enforcement tax and normal sales taxes. The state keeps all the liquor enforcement tax. Cities get none of those tax collections. In Lawrence, this is big business. In fiscal year 2015, there was just less than $50 million in liquor sales in Douglas County, according to state reports. The state collected $3.99 million in liquor enforcement tax revenue. (If $50 million sounds like a lot, remember that bars also pay the tax. If a bar buys its liquor from a liquor store it pays the 8 percent tax or it also pays the tax if it buys it directly from a distributor. Also, don’t confuse this tax with the 10 percent drink tax when you order a cocktail at a bar. That’s a separate tax, so consumers do pay quite a few taxes when they are ordering liquor by the drink.)

If Lawrence and Douglas County were allowed to charge their local sales taxes on those liquor sales, that would result in nearly $1.3 million in additional sales tax revenue for the city and the county.
I’ve covered City Hall long enough to know that the fact the city gets shut out of those tax revenues is irksome.

But even if the state doesn’t want to let cities and counties get in on the action, an increase in the liquor enforcement tax rate could produce significant revenue for state coffers. According to a state report for fiscal year 2015, there were $823.3 million in liquor sales subject to the liquor enforcement tax. If the state decided that it wanted to return to the philosophy of old — where the liquor tax was significantly higher than the general sales tax — it could increase the liquor enforcement tax to 12 percent. That increase would produce about $33 million in new dollars for the state, assuming liquor sales held steady.

It also would net state legislators a lot of political pain. The liquor lobby almost certainly would fight such a change. They would argue that liquor is already taxed at many different levels, and is more heavily taxed than most products, when you consider all the taxes paid from the beginning of production to the end cycle. I’m not here to debate that, and again, I’m not here to say what the right course is.

But I do think it is worth noting that at one point Kansans would go to a liquor store and pay quite a bit higher tax rate for their six-pack of beer than they would for their loaf of bread. For many Kansans, that is no longer the case.

Why is that?

Beats me, and the weekend is coming, so I’m not going to ponder it too long. I tell you one other thing I won’t ponder much this weekend: the debate between beer or bread.