For the past three years, Marilyn Bess has operated MS Philly Organic, a small, low-traffic blog that features occasional posts about green living, out of her Manayunk home. Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.

In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.

“The real kick in the pants is that I don’t even have a full-time job, so for the city to tell me to pony up $300 for a business privilege license, pay wage tax, business privilege tax, net profits tax on a handful of money is outrageous,” Bess says.

Now, here’s the thing. I copied that from a story I found on the web, but the assholes who wrote the story did not have the courtesy to link to Marilyn’s blog! Imagine that!

So, here’s the reference to the site, so you can type in the URL. But I’m not going to make this easy for you because, well, they’re obviously assholes:

It’s at Philidelphia’s “citypaper” and the url is citypaper dot net slash articles two oh one oh oh eight one nine, with some backslahses in there where you might expect, followed by blogging business priviledge tax philidelphia but with dashes where I put spaces and stuff speld right. Good luck.

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