A friend writes:

"I keep hearing that times are soooo bad that '1 in 5 Americans has to make a choice between food and heat and grandma's medicine' blah blah blah.

"So why are all these people paying $100 a ticket to go to concerts?"

OK, my friend was spouting off. Certainly, plenty of people are hurting. Inflation is the highest it has been in 17 years. If you have driven to work or eaten this summer, you know.

But there does seem to be a disconnect between the way Pennsylvanians economize in one place and then blow their money somewhere else.

For instance, the state's drivers clocked 241 million fewer miles in June than in the same month last year. That works out to roughly 9,769 trips around the world not taken in just one month. I don't know where we decided not to go, but we probably didn't need to get there. This is part of a national trend to keep cars in park more often, and the resulting dip in America's gasoline demand has helped drop the cost of crude oil from $147 a barrel five weeks ago to "only" $114 on Friday.

But at the same time Pennsylvanians kept cars in their driveways, Allegheny County reported that the 10 percent drink tax has become a budgetary beer buzz. The tax that was supposed to bring in only $30 million might rake in more than $40 million by year's end.

How can that be? Are residents of the North Hills carpooling to happy hour? Are residents of the South Hills riding the T to their Long Island Iced Teas? Could that many Pittsburghers have found a pub within stumbling distance?

Whatever the reason, wallets still open wide for libations.

Then there's gambling. The five Pennsylvania slots parlors that have been open for more than a year generated almost 10 percent more combined revenue last month than in July 2007. At the Meadows Racetrack & Casino in Washington County, revenue was up almost 16 percent -- this at a time when the national casino industry is slumping.

Government officials like to call this "gaming revenue'' because they don't want to say "the take from losers.'' That might discourage all these benevolent volunteers, most of them Pennsylvanians, who lost $117 million in just five casinos last month. Such a huge haul gives us every reason to believe that Gov. Ed Rendell is right when he predicts Pennsylvania can produce enough losers to drop $3 billion a year, once all casinos are up and running.

Proud? Who wouldn't be? Particularly when all that loot didn't dent the take from the Pennsylvania Lottery. Sales there totaled $3 billion in the past fiscal year, up slightly over the year before, with the popular scratch-and-lose option continuing to grow.

By the way, a recent Carnegie Mellon University study determined that the poorer you feel, the more likely you are to play the Lottery.

To put that another way, the more shafted you feel, the more likely you are to shaft yourself.

Do you remember Ronald Reagan's "trickle-down economy"? I wasn't a big fan, spending most of the 1980s getting trickled on in the right-to-work-for-less state of Virginia.

But that seems preferable to Pennsylvania's "cough-it-up economy." The government here is spending more and more of its time making rich people richer.

The other day, the state Gaming Control Board approved Chicago billionaire Neil Bluhm's takeover of Don Barden's slots license largely because it's too late to turn back. The shells of a half-finished casino and garage are already uglifying the North Shore.

Get big enough and it doesn't matter how much you screw up because you've gotten too big to fail.

You could say the same thing about the federal bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those bailouts are ultimately supposed to help homeowners, but Moody's is still predicting that 2.8 million U.S. householders will either face foreclosure, turn over their homes to their lenders or sell the houses for less than they owe on their mortgages by the end of next year. Maybe those homeowners made bad choices. If so, Pennsylvania invites them to make more. Play the Lottery. Try the slots. If enough people don't get out there and lose, the whole system could go awry.

But there's no immediate danger of that.