>>3312757There's some story about the definition of a biscuit and a cake being settled by the Inland Revenue (equivalent of the IRS in America I think).
Not sure what things you do or don't have in America, so excuse anything that's pointing out the obvious.
We get VAT (Value Added Tax) added to prettymuch everything we buy that's not a basic necessity. It's just a tax of about 20% added on to things, that the company then pays to the Inland Revenue after the sale. Companies don't pay VAT on their purchases since they pay VAT on their products sold, and would effectively be paying VAT twice (pay VAT on the coal and iron, then pay VAT on the steel you sell). They actually do pay VAT on purchases, but they get to reclaim it. Anyway, I digress...
We don't pay VAT on any basic necessities, as I said. Frozen pizzas and chips for example, don't have VAT since they're a basic cheap foodstuff, and ensures even the poorest people can eat. There's no VAT on fresh fruit and veg, children's clothes, books (might only apply to some books), and a whole load of other things.
Anyway, back to my story. In the UK, we have these things called Jaffa cakes. They're small, cakey type, biscuit sized things sold in the same aisle as biscuits in supermarkets.
In the UK, we charge VAT on biscuits (as a luxury product), but not on cakes (as a basic necessity... don't ask, perhaps it's to do with them being traditional for birthdays/christmas etc so everyone should be able to have them). Jaffa cakes were getting charged VAT on their sales, because the taxman saw them as biscuits, but the company said they were cakes. They baked a giant birthday-cake sized jaffa cake to show that they were in fact small cakes, rather than biscuits. The final ruling on the difference between a cake and a biscuit, for the purposes of VAT, was decided that a stale cake went dry and hard, while a stale biscuit went soggy.