A wise philosopher (actually just a professor of mine) once said that history doesn't repeat but it does follow trends.
I thought of that quote when reading that the U.S. Senate is considering a proposal to raise the federal excise tax on wine 233 percent, on beer 145 percent and on liquor 20 percent. Doesn't the Senate know what happened the last time the country was in a crippling economy and alcohol was hard to get?
It's also proposing a "sugar-sweetened beverage excise tax."
Those are just two ideas out of many in the Senate Finance Committee's 41-page report Financing Comprehensive Health Care Reform: Proposed Health System Savings and Revenue Options (PDF and recommended reading for insomniacs). The report was co-written by a Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Democrat Max Baucus of Montana, who make it clear at the beginning that "not all the options in this document have [their] support."
That said, the proposed excise-tax plan does make things less confusing.
The Senators' argument is that wine, beer and liquors are all taxed at
different rates per gallon. They even include a nifty chart in the
report to show current tax rates per gallon and how much they differ:
proposed plan would make a uniformed "$16 per proof gallon on all
alcohol beverages," with only a few tax breaks for small wine and beer
producers. For sugar beverages, the Senators' plan is to make them
subject to the federal excise tax while leaving sugar-free beverages
alone. No mention is given to how much the sugar excise tax would be.
Even though they're just rough ideas at this point, the
uproar over the taxes has already started. Several trade groups have
said beer and wine sales would plummet as people moved to liquor and its relatively mild 22 percent tax raise.
Beer Business Daily says overall sales of alcohol would drop sharply
and that it would take a decade or more for sales to recover. That's what it
says happened last time the federal government raised the federal tax
in 1991, a time it points out "when we in the midst of another
recession."
I'm noticing a trend.
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I'd heard about the Soviet experiment and that vodka was virtually turned into a currency. It's crazy. Is that what lead to the surge in the Russian mafia the way the prohibition here lead to the surge in the Italian mob?
funny I recently read an article mentioning some kind of anniversary of Gorby's fight with alcohohol "The first major reform programme introduced under Gorbachev was the 1985 alcohol reform, which was designed to fight widespread alcoholism in the Soviet Union. Prices of vodka, wine and beer were raised, and their sales were restricted. People who were caught drunk at work or in public were prosecuted. Drinking on long-distance trains and in public places was banned. Many famous wineries were destroyed. Scenes of alcohol consumption were cut out from films. The reform did not have any significant effect on alcoholism in the country[citation needed], but economically it was a serious blow to the state budget (a loss of approximately 100 billion rubles according to Alexander Yakovlev) after alcohol production migrated to the black market economy." The first thing to happen after that was sugar rationing b/c people started making alcohol at home. They even bought up all the hard candy. Here people may have forgotten the prohibition but the soviet experiment happened right when I turned 16.
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