[thackney]

Reading past the headline:

The prospect of a severance tax on gas production in the lucrative Marcellus Shale - an issue dormant since Gov. Ed Rendell left office in 2011 - reemerged this year when gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf campaigned on a platform to use the tax to pump as much as $1 billion into public schools.

[Milton Miteybad]

Yeah...I saw all that. It's clearly supposed to be a severance tax, which is a tax assessed on production at the wellhead. Hence the question arises...why would the author call what is obviously a severance tax a "drilling tax?"

Just seems like an absurdly ignorant/stupid way to describe a a fairly common type of tax that really has little to do with "drilling," per se, and far more with the actual production that occurs after the conclusion of the drilling phase.