It’s telling that Rep. Greg Scott is trying to repeal a Pennsylvania law that makes it a crime to perform fortune telling and other “amusements” like tarot card reading.

We’re not amused. That has nothing to do with Scott. In fact, the Norristown Democrat is doing his job. A constituent brought the issue to him and he is attempting to deal with it legislatively.

The issue is that as states accumulate laws, many become outdated.

When one wonders why so little tends to get done in Harrisburg or other state capitols around the country, these bills are one culprit. It’s not just fortune tellers. Rep. Tom Mehaffie, R-Hershey, has made good on a promise to the Hershey Kiss Committee to enshrine the silver symbol as the state’s official candy, pushing the bill through the House of Representatives and on to the state Senate for consideration. If the bill doesn’t pass during this session the process will begin again.

How many of us have thought Pennsylvania’s fortunes could be changed drastically if we only legalized fortune tellers or named a new state candy?

Think of the state Legislature as a factory, if you will. There is only so much legislation that the legislature can turn out each year – and every piece of legislation dealing with minutiae dealing with things like the prohibition on fortune telling or a host of other sidelight bills is taking legislative time and attention away from more important bills and discussions.

As we struggle to deal with the state budget, school funding, economic development programs and efforts to reverse population decline we are taking up space in our legislative inventory on bills like fortune telling and a new state candy – though Hershey Kisses are delicious and, like Scott, Mehaffie is working on behalf of a constituent. Both bills affect relatively few state residents. These innocuous bills, by themselves, don’t seem too bad. But by allowing legislators to spend time on sidelight issues they allow legislators an excuse to not deal with issues that solve the state’s major problems. But, at the end of the year, legislators can tell their constituents they introduced and/or passed a bunch of bills as a sign of how busy they were.

But busy doing what?