The sales tax holiday in lower Manhattan that started Sunday and runs through today is being billed as a way to draw out-of-town shoppers to the area. But what most of the itinerant bargain hunters don’t know is that while they are exempt from the 8.25% state and city levies on consumer goods, most will still technically owe local taxes, typically around 3 to 4% elsewhere in the state. The culprit is a little known, and little enforced, snake of a tax called the compensating use tax. This tax, a complement to the sales tax, lunges out and bites sales tax averse consumers who try to save money by crossing state or county lines, requiring that any item bought for use in a locality be taxed at that locality’s rate. Thus, New Yorkers buying trinkets in the sales tax haven of, say, New Hampshire are supposed to pony up when they get home, as are Albany residents, such as the governor, who made purchases below Houston Street in the last few days.

While none but the most meticulously law abiding citizens are likely to pay compensating use taxes on items bought during the holiday, the conflict between the law and the reality puts us in a mind to reflect on the problems inherent in sales and use taxes in general. The poor and middle class gets pinched while the wealthy are often able to avoid paying. The city witnessed — and applauded — a dramatic effort by the Manhattan District Attorney to enforce the sales and use taxes, when the former chief executive officer of Tyco International Ltd., L. Dennis Kozlowski, was charged with evading hundreds of thousands of dollars in such taxes by having New York galleries ship paintings to New Hampshire, only for the paintings to end up in Mr. Kozlowski’s Manhattan apartment. Even if Mr. Kozlowski is acquitted, such arrangements are not uncommon in the art world. Jewelry and fur sales are also targets for sales tax evasion by the well off.

But were the DA to have pursued ordinary New Yorkers evading ordinary sales and use taxes, there would have been less sympathy. In 1992, Governor Cuomo’s administration tried to enforce the compensating use tax by staking out an Ikea store at New Jersey and taking down the license plate numbers of New Yorkers suspected to be buying goods taxed at New Jersey’s lower rate. The political backlash guaranteed that no New York governor is likely to pull a similar stunt any time soon, leaving New Yorkers with every reason to continue buying from our lower taxed neighbors in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. While a sales tax holiday for downtown Manhattan is nice, it mainly serves to point out how high taxes are the rest of the year. And to illuminate the illogic of pressing this kind of levy in the first place. Or to put Downtown New York into a position where it’s analogous to Bermuda. If a tax holiday is logical, it’s even more logical to make New York the place where Garden, Constitution, and Keystone Staters come to escape their own tax burdens.