The Case for Booze Taxes
Harold Pollack observes that in public health terms our most serious drug problem by a wide margin is the perfectly legal drug known as alcohol. The good news about alcohol is that whereas cigarette smoking is really bad for you from puff number one, moderate alcohol consumption is genuinely fine. But problem drinking is behind a lot of social ills—not just the famous drunk driving, but developmental disabilities in children, liver damage, violence, etc. And to an enormous extent, the harms caused by excessive drinking are imposed not just on the drinker but on other people, making the case for using taxes to moderate consumption clearer than in the cigarette case.
But Pollack observes that while cigarette taxes have been going up, the reverse is the case with booze: “Over the past 50 years, Cook reports, the inflation-adjusted value of federal liquor taxes declined by a factor of six while the inflation-adjusted value of federal beer taxes declined by a factor of 3.6.” When the time comes to start paying down the massive national debt we’ll be facing, there’s a very strong case that reversing this trend should be part of the picture: “Cook argues that a 10-cent tax per ounce of ethanol (the amount contained in two drinks) would reduce ethanol sales by 12 percent and would reduce motor vehicle fatalities by about 7 percent. An estimated 80 percent of these taxes would be paid by the 13 percent of American adults who are heavy drinkers.”
As with cigarette taxes, you wouldn’t want alcohol taxes to go too high, lest it spawn serious black market issues and associated criminal activity. But a more modest, yet substantial, tax could provide us with some revenue and do an enormous amount to build a safer, healthier country.
139 Responses to “The Case for Booze Taxes”
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January 27th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
You stay away from my likker.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
regressive taxes are awesome.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
What would Sweden do?
Answer: nationalize alcohol distribution and tax the crap out of it.
Its somewhat effective. The downside is that when you go to the store, you buy beers one at a time, instead of by the six pack.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I don’t see how an extra nickel a beer is going to do anything like reducing consumption by 12 percent. Most of us are already spending something like $1.25/beer to drink at home, and more like $4 if we go out. At the bar, the incidence of the tax will almost certainly be on the bar owners; I don’t see them charging that extra nickel. At home, it’s still just a 4% difference. Say you go through 12 beers a week — well within the realm of moderate drinking. That’s still just about $30 a year in added taxes, vs. about $1500 in beer. I don’t think the elasticity of demand is anywhere near that high.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
“whereas cigarette smoking is really bad for you from puff number one”
People who write things like this should probably refrain from opining about public health. Or maybe I am wrong and you can cite a reputable source for this claim? A source that can highlight why the toxins in cigarette smoke are so uniquely hazardous that they somehow manage to define the truism that, you know, the actual dose of the toxin in question is important.
Keep in mind that there is cyanide in apple seeds. But you can eat a lot of apples before the cyanide becomes a concern. But somehow, we get to the point that we say things like a single puff of cigarette smoke is “really bad for you.”
Jesus Christ.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Since it is excess drinking that carries so many social ills, any taxes on liquor should reflect this. So, for example, your first drink at a bar could be tax free, with escalating taxes for each subsequent drink–so that by the time you get to, say, drink 12, you would have to pay a $10 surcharge.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I suppose it would be handy for the government if they were to tax alcohol until its poorest consumers could no longer afford even that small indulgence in their lives, but wouldn’t it be better to work on curing the societal ills that drive people to drink in the first place? Things like long hours for pathetic wages with no benefits and so forth? Since when is it the government’s job, anyway, to mandate that all citizens live “healthy” lives?
January 27th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
What one chooses to put in other peoples’ bodies – absolutely sacred.
What one chooses to put in one’s own body – subject to public scrutiny and regulation by the government.
Fuck that.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
plz do not hire the taxs on my prescious hooche.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
I wish you weren’t so damn paternalistic. Oh well. Whatever.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I have often wondered why marijuana is illegal but booze ain’t, given how rarely anyone puffs some grass and then takes a notion to go home & kick the shit out of his wife.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Regressive taxes can be offset by making other taxes more progressive. This works out to a tax increase on poor heavy drinkers, but a decrease on the rest of the poor.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
If we’re going to go all out paternalism, let’s at least do it smart. How about tax credits for running a few laps each day? But no, it’s always the fault of big business that Americans are generally fat, coughing disasters.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
You beat me to the punch, Sam. Thing about cigarettes is that their harmful effects have been ludicrously overstated. I may be remembering wrong, but I believe you have to smoke like a pack a day for 20 years to have a statistically significant increase in risk for the really bad stuff associated with cigarette smoking (lung cancer, heart disease).
January 27th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
A five cent tax per drink will reduce sales (and presumably, consumption) by 12%? That math looks awfully fuzzy to me and I haven’t had a single drink yet.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Re “As with cigarette taxes, you wouldn’t want alcohol taxes to go too high, lest it spawn serious black market issues and associated criminal activity.”
————
Er..those of us from Appalachia see that as a Feature, not a Bug.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Bootleggers and preachers could use the extra bidness.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
I also think the dangers of cigarette smoking are ridiculously overstated. I’ve known men who smoked all their lives and lived to age 80. I also think the benefits of quitting cigarettes is partially offset by the increased risk of diabetes from weight gain.
Fortunately, it’s easy to bypass the high price of cigarettes and get them for about $9 a carton.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Man, Matt’s society sounds like it would be a banging place to hang out – I don’t know why conservative ideas resonate so well with middle America in comparison.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Is Matt on some kind of Bizarro-Sarah Palin kick where he tries to make liberalism as unpalatable to the masses as possible?
Hey, you know what will make ordinary people really think liberals are a bunch of pantywaisted nanny-staters? BOOZE TAXES. EUREKA!
January 27th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Man, Matt’s society sounds like it would be a banging place to hang out
Yeah. If I lived in such a society, I’d probably kill myself by jumping off a tall building. Oh, wait.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
I also think the dangers of cigarette smoking are ridiculously overstated. I’ve known men who smoked all their lives and lived to age 80.
C’mon, now. Anecdotes like that aren’t too convincing in the face of the empirical evidence out there.
January 27th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
There was a recent meta-analysis on this very topic. Short version: alcohol taxes reduce overall drinking and problem drinking. There is link to the full text through the NYT article. Sorry if the link is messed up.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Like I said, sorry about the link.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Boy, Matt, you sure know how to put up my civil-libertarian hackles. If we’re going to have a tax on booze, I’d rather see it on the hard shit to push people into drinking beer instead of distilled spirits.
Mostly I’d like to see the realization that these sorts of problems are better dealt with by changing the national consciousness, not by clubbing the drunken populace over the head with sin taxes and so forth. Psychological studies show that pretty much all of the effects of alcohol (including aggressive behavior) are due to expectation–meaning that a group of people told they have had alcohol but in fact received none behave identically to an actually-boozed group.
Take France and England. England has a massive alcohol problem, yet France has a much more liberal alcohol policy.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Jesus. I’m an idiot. Here’s the URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/health/research/20patterns.html?ref=research
January 27th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Why do so many anti-tax, anti-public policy libertarians read this blog? It genuinely puzzles me. I mean, I don’t spend much time at McArdle’s place.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
You guys do realize SCHIP is being funded by an extra 61 cents per pack tax on cigarettes, right? This isn’t exactly an off-the-wall suggestion.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Jesus, Yglesias sounds like he’s channeling Gregg Easterbrook.
You know what would provide more revenue? Not paying Merril Lynch employees bonuses out of bailout money.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
I strongly commend Matt’s view on paternalistic forms of taxation. Now if only he can convince Obama to enact some sort of alcohol tax (preferably on beer) Republicans can start winning elections again.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Re tsg’s comment “C’mon, now. Anecdotes like that aren’t too convincing in the face of the empirical evidence out there.”
——————
Er.. I define “empirical evidence” as what I see with my own eyes.
I define “anecdotes” as news reports written by people I don’t know, paid for by factions I don’t know, and for motives I haven’t uncovered. Judith Miller’s New York Times reports on Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, for example.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Matt, This is why we Democrats can drive people crazy. Who the heck are you to decide what’s healthy for someone? It’s the nanny state on steroids. Maybe we should tax internet usage since it can lead to a whole series of bad things– dependence on pornography, social isolationism, etc. Seriously, get a grip.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Re Sam M and cyanide in apple seeds; don’t you remember that one GI Joe episode where there was this big alien blob that they killed by throwing a bunch of apples at it and bombing it with apples, until it had absorbed so much cyanide that it died? Don’t sleep on apple seeds, that’s some dangerous shit.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Raising taxes to raise money is one thing. Raising taxes to raise adults is another. How about just raising the taxes a little, and nixing the “for your own good” part.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
@ Mark R and Sam M:
I think the fact that cigarettes contain a highly addictive substance called NICOTINE is what makes those early puffs so dangerous. Cool man, I don’t have to worry about these things giving me heart disease and lung cancer for another, like, 20 years. Oh wait, it’s 20 years later AND I’M STILL FU**ING ADDICTED.
Jesus Christ.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Don, there’s a historical moment I’d like to recommend to you. It’s called the Enlightenment. You’ll love it.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
I’ve quit smoking hundreds of times. It’s easy.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
This is just another item added to the very long list of ways Matt wants to turn the rest of America into Manhattan, by making our drinks crazy expensive.
Seriously, if one were wishing to start a blog to parody the worst of out-of-touch east coast elitist liberalism, you could just copy/paste all of the MY posts about cars, yards, trains, and this one.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
To tomemos:
Found those nukes of Saddam’s yet?
How about what Hank Paulson did with that $350 Billion?
January 27th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
“Who the heck are you to decide what’s healthy for someone?”
Right! I drive better when I’m drunk! And when I can legally go 90 miles an hour!
And who is the FDA to tell me that my medication doesn’t work? That’s just, like, your opinion, man!
Honestly, how many laws are not based in some way on what’s healthy for people?
January 27th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Apparently this thread is getting my hackles up:
Don, here’s what’s wrong with your asinine I-once-knew-a-dude-who-lived-until-he-was-80 “not anecdotal” argument. Conviniently wikipedia keeps us on topic:
Got that?
January 27th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
I’m not sure if taxing alcohol would actually reduce consumption as much as taxing cigarettes does. If I learned anything in college, it was that there is always a cheaper, shittier brand of whatever you are drinking.
I think it’s safe to say that most of the drinking that’s a health problem in this country is done among people who don’t really care about the quality of what they are drinking. They’ll be much more likely to substitute for the same amount of an inferior brand rather than drink less of whatever crap they are already drinking.
The paternalistic nature of an alcohol tax doesn’t bother me, but I don’t really think it will work that well.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
I honestly don’t think you have to be anti-tax or a libertarian to be opposed to some of these sin taxes. I just see it as an issue of priorities.
Yeah, we could do everything possible to maximize every citizen’s lifespan. We could outlaw contact sports, put 40 mph limiters on everyone’s cars, ban cigarettes and booze, ban motorcycles/scooters/bicycles/rollerblades and while we’re at it ban all the yuppie-friendly outdoor sports like camping and hiking and skiing. After all, people could get lost in the woods, right! And don’t even think about having sex. It’s a minefield!
What’s the point of living if you can’t have fun? You don’t need to be an off-the-grid Paultard in Ruby Ridge to be skeptical of some of this stuff.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Should we levy a tax on blogs that drive us to drink?
January 27th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Don: Well, by your standard, you’ve never seen that they’re not there. I bet you’ve never seen Iraq with your own eyes; how do you even know there is such a place?
Reliable reports from others is how we know (and could strongly suspect at the time) that there were no WMDs. It’s also how we know that smoking really does tend to kill you.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
This points, again, to something that disturbs me about your conception of liberalism. You seem to feel the proper role of a tax code is to tell people how to live their lives; to tax behaviors you feel undesirable out of existence.
I can’t say I’m entirely comfortable with that premise; I’d like to see you expand on your reasons for supporting it.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
“I think it’s safe to say that most of the drinking that’s a health problem in this country is done among people who don’t really care about the quality of what they are drinking.”
This is rich. Yes, drinkers of Highland Park are just too cultured to drive drunk or get cirrhosis. The rich don’t have drinking problems; just ask Mel Gibson.
In fact, we should issue special High-Shelf Booze vouchers to the poor, so that they can finally see what they’ve been missing. Then they’ll never drink that swill again! Snobbishness always prevails!
January 27th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
How about a Cheeto tax?
January 27th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
I like that President Obama smokes.
But then I think: what about the children??? THE CHILDREN!
What if Obama quits smoking and gets edgy and on nerves and bombs Iran? He shouldn’t quit until he’s out of office.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Does anyone really disagree with raising revenue in tough times through a tax on a recreational beverage? We’re just upset about the framing, right?
January 27th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Re: Obama and Smoking
I said it then and I’ll repeat it now: Ohio and Pennsylvania would not have even been in contest during the primaries or the general if Obama had gone into a union bar and fired up a Marlboro Red. New York and California would have gasped, but voted in line nonetheless.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
People from Wisconsin generally frown on the idea that some east coast elitist that knows better than the rest of us thinks that we should pay more for our liquor FOR OUR OWN GOOD. Nanny state / paternalistic government shenanigans do not play well here AT ALL. Wisconsin has been blue since 1988. Please don’t wreck it.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
I love these folks who presume to tell us that REAL Americans are booze lovin’ libertarians.
The US has thousands of “dry” counties. There’s something like 15 states where you can only buy hard liquor from highly regulated government-run stores. It’s a nation that passed a constitutional amendment to ban drinking. Yeah, we rolled the amendment back when it didn’t work, but the idea that a small tax on booze is somehow inconsistent with our national character because we don’t restrict alcohol, or because government policies to promote less drinking are somehow deeply unpopular with Americans–that’s just plain nuts.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Anonymiss: Exactly. And all the people worrying about this being the Issue That Will Beat the Democrats, do you think the religious right is going to let the Republicans become the “Have a drink!” party?
January 27th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
People opposing this on libertarian grounds are being very foolish. Do you really mean to suggest that alcohol consmption does not have negative externalities? If we are going to allow people to get drunk, as I firmly believe we should, we need to protect ourselves from the drunken idiots who commit the vast majority of crimes and property damage. That costs money. The people who should pay that money are the people who profit from the freedom to sell booze. Of course, if the brewers and distillers pay it, so will the drinkers, indirectly.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
I am strongly opposed to additional taxes on liquor on the basis that the heavy consumption of cheap booze is my primary tactic for getting through this recession.
I am sure I am not alone in this regard.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
I actually strongly disagree with this. Basically, most things that we can tax in this way have clearly defined negative externalities (you know, 1:1,000,000 kids go retarded for each barrel of toxic sludge, so you slap a cost on that and pass it on to the guy who makes the sludge), and a clearly definite positive internality. That is, if I buy an iPod for $100, that’s because I have weighed up all the different things my iPod is good for, and I think they’re all worth $100 (or more). There will be very few benefits that accrue to other people when I buy an iPod. So if scientists find out that iPods make baby Jesus cry, we can tax iPods to make the buyer internalize all the costs and benefits of the iPod in his purchase decision.
Booze is different. When you’re drinking you get a little happy feeling, but most of the benefits of you drinking go to the people you’re hanging out with. So there are huge positive externalities – both short term delight at drunken antics, and long term friendship networks formed around drinking -, in addition to significant negative externalities. There’s no sense in trying to calculate both the negative and positive externalities and coming up with a remainder. If we take a policy interest in the negative effects of drinking, we should focus on removing situations that make unsafe behavior likely (like urban areas without good mass transit).
January 27th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Tomemos,
I think you miss the point about people reacting to higher taxes by reducing quality rather than quantity. It’s not that super-rich people like Mel Gibson don’t drink and drive; rather, people like Mel Gibson are not going to change their drinking habits in response to a $0.05 tax per drink. The point of the tax is to induce people to change their behavior in response to the increased cost, so we have to look at people who are going to be sensitive to that kind of cost increase. The question Mike was trying to raise is how are people going to change their behavior in response to that cost increase? Consider the case of a guy who drinks 10 Highland Parks a day then drives around drunk: if the cost increases to the point where he is no longer willing or able to afford 10 Highland Parks per day, what is he going to do instead? The goal of the policy is get him to reduce the quantity of his alcohol consumption, i.e. to get him to buy fewer than 10 Highland Parks. Mike was suggesting, quite plausibly, that instead of doing that he simply switch to drinking 10 of something cheaper, i.e. reduce quality instead of quantity. If that’s the case then the policy will not produce the desired result — he’ll still have ten drinks then drive home. There’s nothing snobbish in that analysis. It applies to nearly all social classes and income levels; for example, the college student might switch from drinking a 12-pack of Budweiser to a 12-pack of Old Milwaukee.
Highland Park drinkers
January 27th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
OK, let’s have an alcohol tax that defrays the cost to society of alcohol and a cheeto tax that defrays the cost to society of cheetos. One is going to be a lot higher than a nickel a drink, the other will require the minting of the centipenny.
January 27th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Effects of beverage alcohol price and tax levels on drinking: a meta-analysis of 1003 estimates from 112 studies
Alexander C. Wagenaar, Matthew J. Salois & Kelli A. Komro
University of Florida, College of Medicine, Department of Epidemiology and Health Policy Research, Gainesville, FL, USA
ABSTRACT
Aims
We conducted a systematic review of studies examining relationships between measures of beverage alcohol
tax or price levels and alcohol sales or self-reported drinking. A total of 112 studies of alcohol tax or price effects were found, containing 1003 estimates of the tax/price–consumption relationship. Design Studies included analyses of alternative outcome measures, varying subgroups of the population, several statistical models, and using different units of analysis. Multiple estimates were coded from each study, along with numerous study characteristics. Using reported estimates, standard errors, t-ratios, sample sizes and other statistics, we calculated the partial correlation for the relationship between alcohol price or tax and sales or drinking measures for each major model or subgroup reported within each study. Random-effects models were used to combine studies for inverse variance weighted overall estimates of the magnitude and significance of the relationship between alcohol tax/price and drinking.
Findings
Simple means of reported elasticities are -0.46 for beer, -0.69 for wine and -0.80 for spirits. Meta-analytical
results document the highly significant relationships (P < 0.001) between alcohol tax or price measures and indices of
sales or consumption of alcohol (aggregate-level r = -0.17 for beer, -0.30 for wine, -0.29 for spirits and -0.44 for total alcohol).
Price/tax also affects heavy drinking significantly (mean reported elasticity = -0.28, individual-level r = -0.01, P < 0.01), but the magnitude of effect is smaller than effects on overall drinking.
Conclusions
A large literature establishes that beverage alcohol prices and taxes are related inversely to drinking. Effects are large compared to other prevention policies and programs. Public policies that raise prices of alcohol are an effective means to reduce drinking.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Brocktoon, get out of here with that “evidence” and “data”! Where do you think you are? We use anecdotal evidence and knee-jerk generalities here.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
We should also prevent people from living in the same residences, particularly husbands and wives. And all sidewalks should be urine resistant and self cleaning and all windows unbreakable. Building codes should be upgraded so that all of our one person residences are soundproofed so that drunks walking down the street yelling about having “One fucking ball” don’t disturb their anyone.
Wow. Making sure booze has no negative externalities is sure going to cost a lot.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Well, at least the proposal is to tax alcohol content, not the overall price of the product. I mean, sheesh, my snooty brand bourbon is expensive enough.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Re tomemos’s question “do you think the religious right is going to let the Republicans become the “Have a drink!” party?”
—————-
I don’t know. Why don’t we ask the leading spokeman for the right wing movement?
http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/10/10/rush.limbaugh/
January 27th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
I can’t believe all these “nanny state” comments. I mean, you all realize we’re screwed right? Taxes are going to have to be raised sooner or later. Would you rather an increase in income tax? Property tax? Sales tax?
If you have to increase taxes, you may as well do it to discourage unhealthy behavior, particularly when that unhealthy behavior is unhealthy for people that don’t even participate (i.e. victims of drunk driving, bushes in people’s front yards, etc.)
While we’re at it, legalize other recreational drugs immediately and heavily tax them, the more addictive they are the higher the tax. You want to do it, fine, but you’re paying down our national debt if you do so.
Every other tax sucks even worse than sin taxes. I enjoy a drink too, but I’d rather pay tax on my drinks than on my crappy job.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Yes, I am upset about the framing.
For example, Harold Pollack points out that drinking increases by 20% when young people reach the legal drinking age, while the death rate goes up 10%.
IOW, most young drinkers don’t care whether it’s legal, and apparently they’re not bad drivers, as the car wrecks only go up in response to the addition of young people who previously weren’t drinking. Harold then goes further down the primrose path, suggesting that lowering the drinking age would increase deaths at an earlier age, and it probably would, but the increase is a one-time event.
Or take the idea that increasing the price will reduce drinking. But every young person today already carries a bottle of water that costs more than cheap beer! The reason they’re not drinking beer is they don’t want to drink beer, not because of the cost.
As for the idea that taxes would help pay for externalities, whatta load of bull. Every state is closing clinics and shelters, but the military budget keeps getting bigger by the minute.
Now, if Matt and Harold wanted to point out that advertising for beer and tobacco should not be allowed as an expense to be deducted from taxable income, that would be a different matter. They could also point out that health care, vocational training, and housing assistance are what people really need to get off an ‘addiction’ pathway.
But this b-s playing with figures to make the world a safe place for 21-year olds is for the birds.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Maybe we should apply this approach to another controversial procedure: If we were to tax abortion at a reasonable rate (say, $5,000-$10,000 per occurence) that would do a lot to decrease the rate of what everyone seems to agree is a undesirable activity.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Moderate alcohol drinking is not just “fine”, it is generally believed to be good for you.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
I have no sympathy for libertarianism, but even the die hards will concede the legitimacy of Pigouvian taxes directed toward negative externalities.
I think the problem a lot of people have stems from the fact that the negative effects of drinking aren’t evenly distributed and aren’t necessarily proportional to the amount people drink. The vast majority of adults in this country consume alcohol, but don’t beat their spouses no matter how much they have to drink. Most of the problems associated with alcohol are caused by a small percentage of people. Policies that attempt to address those problems by reducing overall alcohol consumption strike many as collectively punishing the majority for the socially destructive behaviors of a few.
There’s also the implicit assumption that public policy should seek to maximize safety and longevity, even at the expense of other values. You can’t discount the fact that drinking is fun, and alcohol use has been a part of our culture for milenia.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
those of us from Appalachia see that as a Feature, not a Bug.
You’ve been following the case of Popcorn Sutton, I presume?
Take France and England. England has a massive alcohol problem, yet France has a much more liberal alcohol policy.
I’m going to take the Bowling for Columbine approach here, booze culture can be tweaked around the edges, or even more substantially by getting rid of things like the absurd age restrictions or zoning laws that marginalise alcohol consumption, but it’s hard to stop American drink culture, in the wide view, from taking after that of northern Europe.
As anonymiss says, what that brings is a sharp polarisation between prohibition and libertarian (the ’shiners) in a macro version of binge and purge. The result is a kind arbitrage: just as Baptists drive from their dry counties to the next-county-but-one to buy their likker, Finns take the ferry to Tallin and stock up on gut-rot vodka.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
The biggest drawback from a nanny state perspective is that the reductions will probably be in non-problem drinkers – people for whom alcohol may be a net positive with regard to health. Alcoholics are going to drink the amount of alcohol they require. If they have to cut back on other things, so be it. I suppose there is about 3% of the population who drink technically abusive amounts of alcohol without being alcoholics, but that’s slim pickens as far as health benefits.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
James Gary:
Maybe we should apply this approach to another controversial procedure: If we were to tax abortion at a reasonable rate (say, $5,000-$10,000 per occurence) that would do a lot to decrease the rate of what everyone seems to agree is a undesirable activity.
Your analogy is flawless, except for every part of it.
1) The tax on abortion that you’re (sarcastically) suggesting is completely out of proportion with the current cost. No one is suggesting raising the cost of alcohol by 2000%.
2) Everyone doesn’t agree that abortion is undesirable in and of itself; there is no such thing as an “abortion problem,” whereas there is such a thing as an alcohol problem.
3) Most importantly, abortion has no negative externalities. It doesn’t hurt anyone. (Wait, is that the soft footsteps of Hector I hear?) We want to reduce the number of abortions because they’re often (but not always!) a symptom of other problems (poverty, poor education), not because they cause problems themselves. Excessive drinking costs society money; “excessive abortions” don’t.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
“Excessive abortions” actually save society money. I’m not saying that means we should go out campaigning for more of them of course. Just stating a fact.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Still, it is kind of charming to think we could pay down the national debt by taxing the alcoholics. That makes much more sense than taxing the wealthy people who actually have all the money.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
That policy has nothing to do with taxation. Which has a higher proportion of its cost in taxes – an ounce of alcohol purchased in France or one purchased in England? I’d bet on France, but only because of the higher taxes in general.
AS far as policy, we should certainly remove the age restrictions on alcohol. People should learn first hand the effects of alcohol long before they get a license to drive. They should also learn if they are an alcoholic while they are still under a custodial relationship.
I think it is a fairly safe bet that a French adolescent has a better knowledge of what alcohol does when they get their license than either an English or American teen. They also spent a few years drinking under observation by their parents – either developing good drinking habits or learning that they should probably never have another drop.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Taxing drugs that people love = very bad strategy for liberal politicians, likely to get republicans elected and scuttle more important liberal goals.
Proposing to tax drugs that people love = very good strategy for liberal bloggers who want to drive up hits and comments as their drunk readership gets increasingly angry.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
We should also apply sin taxes to minivans, fake tan spray, and the Lifetime channel. For morals.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
From pseudo’s link to Popcorn Sutton’s sentence:
“The Knoxville News Sentinel writes that a raid on Sutton’s property turned up guns, bullets, three 1,000-gallon stills, copper line, more than 800 gallons of moonshine, and hundreds of gallons of sour mash and other ingredients, federal court records show.”
———-
I don’t see what the Feds were so upset about — a small operation like that is obviously just making shine for personal consumption.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
tomemos, I’m obviously being a smartass with my original comment, but I’ll try to squirm a bit.
2 and 3) Everyone does seem to agree that abortion is undesirable in and of itself (i.e., Bill Clinton’s desired goal of “safe, legal, and rare.”) It seems to me to be a far-from-settled issue.
1) my proposed abortion tax-rate is silly, but the point is: if a small tax on alcohol will discourage some consumption, wouldn’t a big tax be even better? If the goal is maximum tax revenue and minimum alcohol consumption, shouldn’t we raise said tax to the highest point at which “serious black market issues and associated criminal activity” don’t occur? (Not everyone who drinks has an alcohol problem. Why should they be required to subsidize those who do?)
January 27th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
The idea that alcohol is a dangerous and degrading poison that must be restricted or licensed by the state to keep it out of the hands of our precious children and hapless adults, i.e. the entire moral foundation for this sin tax, is entirely at odds with the cultural values that encourage harmless or beneficial alcohol consumption.
There’s nothing inherent in alcohol that makes one want to punch things or start screaming at people or drive drunk. Alcohol is linked to those behaviors because due in part to the mystique we attribute to it, those imbibing feel they have a permission slip to bad behavior. “It was the booze!”
It’s a vicious circle. Alcohol is an evil poison leads people under it’s influence to act like it’s an evil poison, leads to efforts to curtail the evil poison etc.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
As a formerly active alcoholic (coming up on 20 years sober next week) and a formerly heavy smoker (2 packs/day for 33 years) I have hands-on experience (so to speak) with both problems. I was lucky that I never got pinched for DUI and the one night I totaled my car on a back road in Stockbridge MA, I had had relatively little (3 beers); on the other hand, my drinking certainly helped to total 3 marriages. I have no opinion on the tax proposal, but if Matt overstates the danger of the first puff, it’s not by much.
There are many problem drinkers who are not physically addicted to alcohol (I am one). But nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known. Maybe one puff won’t hook most, but I became addicted in one week at the age of 19. It doesn’t take a lot, especially when the tobacco companies lace the stuff with more nicotine. I quit 3 times, twice cold (the nastiest physical experiences of my life), was re-addicted after one pack during very stressful situations, finally got it that I could not have just one, and with the help of a medical program stopped for good 16 years ago. I know several people who have kicked both heroin and cigarettes and said that cigarettes were worse.
As for smoking a pack a day for 30 years before you start to pay….good luck fella! When you do start to pay, you’ll spend the rest of your miserable existence regretting every cigarette you smoked. I know that heavy smoking destroyed my father’s heart, brought on a stroke at 64, and had him living a sort of half-life until he died 13 years later. I have lost two cousins and an aunt to emphysema; they spent their last months unable to take a deep breath — a sort of slow water-boarding without the water.
I know how good that first puff feels, especially with a big hangover. And lecturing an addict is useless (no lecture ever affected me…I’m not sure what did). But taxing seems to have helped; I estimate, looking at today’s prices, that quitting has saved me close to 100K, pre-tax. That’s not pocket change.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Actually, there is, but probably not enough to account for the behavior of drunks. Alcohol has significant effects on hormones. It can make people aggressive aside from the obvious loss of judgement. However, your larger point is accurate. The “taboo” effect is probably greater.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Omigod just stop already. If you are smoking cigarettes from packages of American cigarettes, you are not addicted. People who smoke those cigarettes fiddle with them while the chemicals make them burn like a joss stick on methedrine, actually smoking them very little.
Someone who is addicted to nicotine will buy pipe tobacco and smoke it in a pipe or roll it in a cigarette. This is not rocket science. Tax alcohol and alcoholics drink sterno or rubbing alcohol.
Those are real addictions. Fiddling with an American cigarette while it merrily burns itself up is a habit.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Mike was suggesting, quite plausibly, that instead of doing that he simply switch to drinking 10 of something cheaper, i.e. reduce quality instead of quantity. If that’s the case then the policy will not produce the desired result — he’ll still have ten drinks then drive home.
If you raise taxes based on amount of alcohol content, you can easily eliminate the option of switching to something cheaper, e.g. 1 ounce of pure alcohol is taxed at x $.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Why this argument doesn’t apply to marijuana, I’ll never know, but maybe Matt’s still looking for that sinecure at the Washington Post and doesn’t want to look like too much of a hippie.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Another commenter conveniently posted this abstract from a meta-analysis of the elasticity of demand for alcohol:
But these data, unless I’m reading them wrong, fairly conclusively refute the assertion that a 5 cent/drink tax on ethanol will reduce drinking by 12 percent. Reported elasticities range from -0.46 to -0.80. Given that 5 cents/drink is something like 5 percent, the elasticity would have to be -2.5 to get an aggregate reduction in demand of 12 percent.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
There is a framing issue. Yglesias and other mainstream liberals keep tinkering with nice little policy proposals, and trying to nibble around the edges with sin taxes and other bullshit. Meanwhile the largest robbery of the American taxpayer in history is being carried out in broad daylight. Why on earth should we make a lower middle class working woman pay 5 cents more for her glass of wine when Wall Street executives are walking away with literally billions of taxpayer dollars? Why is there not more public media outrage about this? I travel around the country and people of all social classes and religions – in Utah, in Massachusetts, in New York, in California – everyone I talk to is disgusted by the Merrill bonuses, the AIG fiasco, the lack of transparency. Yet the whole fiasco of the bailout is being strangely underplayed in the media. I think there’s a genuine groundswell of real anger starting to build here and Washington and New York are doing all they can to distract people. To my mind “booze taxes” are just another distraction – let’s focus on the thieves.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
James,
What everyone agrees is that unwanted pregnancy is a problem. I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who is Pro-Choice and disagrees with the statement that it is better to have used birth control and not gotten pregnant in the first place.
That is why your analogy fails, abortion doesn’t have a societal cost, it actually saves money since it is a lot more expensive to raise a kid than not.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
It depends on the booze to some extent. But overall, I’d bet on the UK: the ‘booze cruise’ to Calais exists for a reason, as do the various branches of British supermarkets and booze-sellers at French Channel ports.
There’s a slight flaw in your comparison: in both Britain and France, most young adults don’t learn to drive until the very end of their teenage years, and fewer of them own a car.
The interesting thought experiment is what would change if the drinking age and driving age were reversed, not least in terms of things like urban planning, or the approach to alcohol as part of the social fabric of college. My suspicion is that if you’re drinking underage, you’re actually more likely to drive as a kind of psychological cover.
January 27th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
That is why your analogy fails, abortion doesn’t have a societal cost
For those who consume in moderation, alcohol doesn’t have a societal cost either.
January 27th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
MKD say:
“I think the fact that cigarettes contain a highly addictive substance called NICOTINE is what makes those early puffs so dangerous.”
Um.. that’s not what MY said. If that were the case, we could cite the addictive qualities of alcohol and blame all the ills of severe alcoholism on the “first drink.” Which is crap.
How many people in their 60s and 70s do you know who smoked in their 20s and 30s? I bet it’s something close to 75 percent. How many still smoke? I bet not many. How many died of lung cancer? Not many.
Hordes of people take a “first puff” and suffer no consequences at all, at that moment or down the road. In fact, the VAST MAJORITY of people who take a first puff fit this description. Thus the claim that “smoking is bad for you from puff one,” while interesting, suffers from the fact that it is utter bullshit.
It’s wrong. It’s a lie. And “reality based” people ought not lie. Or speak out their ass.
January 27th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Ummm … I don’t know about where MY lives but where I live I pay excise taxes on Booze to the Feds, the State, the County, the City, and a special additional pouring tax to the city – plus state sales tax.
Plus the state (PA) is the only legal intermediary for alcohol sales. The bars must buy from the state, and the only liquor stores are state owned. In fact the Commonwealth of PA is the second largest purchaser of alcohol (by $ value) in the world!
January 27th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Matt, rather than increasing taxes, what do you think of producing quality public service announcements… like the cigarette mash or the one with R2D2 smoking?
January 27th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
What about red wine?
That is not a health risk, indeed it is a health benefit, and it would be preferrable if more people drank red wine instead of hard liquor.
January 27th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Perhaps Matt is thinking about “that first puff” that leads to a pack, that leads to resuming smoking; for those of us who have been addicted, quit, then relapsed. THAT first puff is a doozy.
January 27th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Vanya and catowner, I hear ya. Glad to see “Eat the Rich” back in fashion, myself.
January 27th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
I don’t think Matt was thinking very hard about anything when he wrote that line, so it’s not really worth parsing. As to your point, though…uggh. Is that really the standard we want to use for these things? There are COUNTLESS moments of rational contemplation between the first puff and death by lung cancer and, in each one, our hypothetical nicotine addict has decided that the satisfaction derived from smoking outweighs the deleterious effects. I won’t say say that quitting is easy, though I’ve done it myself without any difficulty. But I think that addiction to nicotine is used to rationalize a decision made in spite of serious health consequences. Our culture is obsessed with longevity, so casually shortening one’s life for what seems to others like a silly habit is hard to justify. There was a time when an informed decision about smoking probably wasn’t possible. That time has come and gone, though, and we need to stop treating cigarettes like boogeymen.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
A recent extensive study showed that moderate alcohol drinkers save Medicare $400/year on average. Beer drinkers save the most on average. Heavy drinkers cost the same as non-drinkers.
If we are going to move to National Health, raising taxes on alcohol will probably reduce revenues and decrease health.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
I think a bigger threat to public health than alcohol is automobiles.
They spew pollution into the air, filling our lungs with plenty of gunk. They cause global warming.
They kill lots of people. And they are even deadlier when someone has a few cold ones and goes for a spin.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
If the goal of this policy is to decrease externalities, then statistics about expected decreases in alcohol consumption are insufficient to justify the policy. Alcohol use is not the externality. Vehicle deaths, social disruption, and violence are. This tax sounds very overbroad in that it would punish those who are not the perpetrators of the ills in question. I take it that most people who consume alcohol do so in moderation. And even for those who get hammered on a regular basis, not all of them (and I’d wager not most of them) engage in dangerous behaviors such as driving or fighting strangers after drinking heavily. I just don’t see this as a very defensible way to regulate antisocial behavior. Implementing convenient rail-based transportation and disincentivizing driving, for instance, would decrease the number of drunk driving deaths without imposing unfair costs on those whose behavior is changed (i.e. those who would drink and drive will take the train instead, but they still get from A to B, and they still get to drink as they wish). If you’re going to push for a reduction in externalities, push the least regressive, least paternalistic, and least overbroad policy first if the benefits are equal.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Re Jimboslice’s comment “Plus the state (PA) is the only legal intermediary for alcohol sales. The bars must buy from the state, and the only liquor stores are state owned.”
————-
Yeah, but hauling the booze across the Ben Franklin bridge from Jersey somehow makes it taste better.
And when the Pennsylvania Wine and Spirit Board sent some agents down to Wilmington Delaware a few years ago to stake out the liquor stores on 202, the Delaware police arrested the agents for loitering. hee hee
January 27th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Has anyone done a genealogy on Matt? I am beginning to wonder if one of his ancestors was Cotton Mather. He seems to have it in these days for anything that makes life a tad more more enjoyable for the masses.
And by the way, booze taxes may have fallen, but booze prices certainly have not. Ten years ago I rarely paid more than $3 a drink. Nowadays it’s hard to find even beer that cheap, except maybe at happy hour.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Not sure if anyone cares, but most of our knowledge about what cigarettes do to you is gleaned from a gigantic cohort study commissioned by the ACS in the 1950’s. There are tons of good papers about it, and you can read a lot of them online. Most of the empirical questions you can ask about smoking have been answered pretty conclusively already.
I happen to be what the academics call a “VLS” or Very Light Smoker, meaning I smoke an average of less than 1 cigarette per day. We’re the hardest group to study, but there’s definitely significant evidence that my smoking is a major risk factor for death from heart attack.
The good news is, that risk basically goes away shortly after I smoke my last cigarette. I should stop, yeah?
Modern thinking on that is that in addition to the well-known long-term health risks of smoking there is an acute increase in the risk of death from certain causes (heart attack, chiefly) in the few minutes after you smoke a cigarette.
So to sum up, yes, one puff of a cigarette is bad for you. They’ve studied it! But if you’re below a certain age, your starting risk of the acute health problems brought on by cigarettes is low enough that for practical purposes your chance of dying doesn’t increase that much.
Thought people might be interested in the facts, but of course since someone’s grandpa lived to be really old, it’s all probably BS.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Taxing alcohol is not, in my mind, a question of the “nanny state” mentality–which happens to drive me crazy, as when Mayor Bloomberg banned smoking in nightclubs. no, i don’t smoke. but i never went to nightclubs as if i expected a health spa, either.
BUT, unlike smoking, MOST OF ALCOHOL’S WORST DAMAGES ARE INFLICTED ON OTHERS, and on society at large.
Unless we can tax domestic violence, or murder, the closest we can come is maybe to tax the one factor most clearly and consistently found to be a contributing factor: alcohol.
Alcohol is repeatedly implicated in both the perpetrator AND THE VICTIM of violent crime. over and over again, study after study. i know correlation does not ‘mean’ causation, but after enough such studies pile up, you have to wonder.
Domestic violence, especially, but all murders, assaults, rapes, and related crimes show this pattern.
The correlation is much stronger than for any other drug (yes, even crystal meth), any combination of drugs, or other ‘causative’ factors .
of course the numbers on driving are so well known that we don’t have to discuss them, but again, the damage is inflicted on US, not so much on the drunk driver (the driver’s seat is the lowest-fatality location in the car).
and yes, i do drink, and enjoy it plenty. (miss smoking when i drink tho…..sigh…) so, i do not consider this a moral issue.
But given the consequential nature of the issue, society has a right, maybe an obligation, to tax a behavior or its instrument that costs us all so much. prohibition or smoking bans or bicycle helmet laws are nanny-statism. taxing a costly, dangerous substance in the hope of recouping some of the health, safety, and incarceration cost it inflicts on others is common sense. if the tax also reduces the behavior a bit, that’s okay too.
January 27th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
interesting, but i don’t think anything except some israel/palestine something or other ever got this many posts.
hmmm….
January 27th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Re Ape Man’s comment “but of course since someone’s grandpa lived to be really old, it’s all probably BS.”
————-
I also saw a scientific report that posting comments on Internet blogs makes your penis shrivel.
January 27th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
How about a tax on basketball fans instead?
January 27th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
you know: the number of people leaving this state (california) has for at least the last couple years exceeded the number of people moving here
i don’t know if a breakdown by income is available but your guess (from talking to people and hearing what you hear) is that a lot of these people are middle and professional class
it isn’t just that the cost of living has gone up and the quality of life has gone down a bunch over the past decade+ it’s that taxes here are already too high for people…and the state is deep in the red
this may be the beginning of a new exodus from the state; you suspect it isn’t just white flight this time but also middle class latinos, asians, african-americans, other
all this talk of new taxes makes me think some libs didn’t learn a thing from the carter era
i don’t know where the cash will come from but the pentagon budget is a good place to start
January 27th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
“Modern thinking on that is that in addition to the well-known long-term health risks of smoking there is an acute increase in the risk of death from certain causes (heart attack, chiefly) in the few minutes after you smoke a cigarette.”
Um… Wrong. Complete, nonsensical paranoia, as demonstrated quite ably by Dr. Michael Seigel all the time at http://www.tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com. And he’s an anti-tobacco crusader. Yes, there are a few people acutely sensitive to tobacco smoke, and for people with those (rare) conditions, a whiff can be bad. But for the average guy, not so much.
If this is the standard, we will need to tax everything, because someone, somewhere is allergic to everything. Some people will die from a whiff of peanut butter. But we don’t try to tax that into oblivion to save the super-sensitive. Instead, we tell those people to, you know, not go around stuff they are allergic to.
Think this through. If tobacco were really bad for you from the first puff, the second puff would make things worse, no? So why would someone like MY quit? After sucking down 40 or 60 of them per day, every day, for 10 years or so, he’d be doomed. But in truth, quitting is a good thing. Meaning that the body recovers. MY will be fine, even after hundreds of thousands, if not millions of puffs. Even after smoking several packs a day for several decades.
In the case of second hand smoke, the “dire” health threat is actually only a “relative risk” of 1.19. Meaning that 1 out of about 50,000 people exposed will die. Which seems like a lot, until you realize that for the purpose of this measure, “exposed” means exposed to very high levels of SHS for eight hours a day for 40 years. By halving the exposure (by,say, working for only 20 years, or for only 4 hours per day, or by working in a bar that has half the concentration of SHS) you halve the mortality. And in doing so, you reduce the RR to a statistically insignificant number. (It’s damn close to insignificant as is.) Now think about reducing that exposure down to the level of one puff on a cigarette. Clearly, claims that a single puff poses a serious health threat are ridiculous.
One puff on a cigarette does not pose a serious health threat. That claim is crap. It is untrue. And ought to be reconsidered and retracted. Especialy by someone interested in reality.
Maybe if the CBO released this claim as a study and someone called it a report, MY would wake up and smell the lie.
January 27th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Fuck you very much
January 28th, 2009 at 12:15 am
Think about it. How often do you hear about very young people dying from booze? Combine auto accidents, fraternity hazings, immoderate use of grain alcohol, and you get a fair number. It’s not as grim as MADD would have you believe, but people die from acute alcohol poisoning and from alcohol-related stupidity.
Now: How often do you hear about college sophomores dying of cigarette related lung-cancer? Never. Because it hardly ever happens. If ever.
January 28th, 2009 at 12:22 am
Ike, exactly. That’s something with externalities – fucking. 15 million new cases of STD’s every year, 3 million unplanned pregnancies. Why don’t we tax that?
January 28th, 2009 at 2:29 am
Let’s quit enabling the cowardice of Government by allowing them to hide behind sin taxes. Last year Texas levied an additional buck a pack tax on cigarettes. The money was needed to make up for a huge shortfall in our education budget. The shortfall was a function of the state lottery (touted as a tax cutting, win- win for Texas and our kids) receipts being down dramatically. The median income of our lottery players is 40,000 per year; the median income of our smokers is 30,000. And now SCHIP is adding another 61 cents per pack.Is there something wrong with a picture where those with the lowest incomes shoulder so much of the costs of educating and insuring our children? If it’s a good thing, shouldn’t everybody pay their share?
January 28th, 2009 at 6:18 am
Re: Alcohol is repeatedly implicated in both the perpetrator AND THE VICTIM of violent crime. over and over again, study after study.
The problem with this assertion is that this is true only for a small minority of drinkers. As others have asked, why should everyone have to pay for the sins of the few? Why not just fine the malefactors and leave the rest of us alone?
January 28th, 2009 at 7:31 am
When Matt says “cigarette smoking is really bad for you from puff number one” the “really bad” part is overstating things but it is true that for tobacco, unlike alchohol, there is no threshhold level below which there is no danger. If you only smoke a cigarette a day for a short enough period of time, the danger may be immeasurably small, but it is there.
January 28th, 2009 at 7:41 am
P.S. Lung cancer may be the disease most publicly associated with tobacco smoking, but it is far from the only danger.
Smoking is also implicated in everything from increased susceptibility to the common cold, to a five-fold increase in the risk of having a heart attack before the age of 40.
Note: people under 40 don’t have many heart attacks, so the absolute risk of a tobacco induced heart attack when young is fairly small, but relative risk is quite large.
January 28th, 2009 at 7:48 am
Why is it not legitimate to engage in something a little dangerous? And if it isn’t, shouldn’t we first try to keep people from doing the MOST dangerous things? If we are going to tax smoking, why not tax people who launch themselves into the air with a trebuchet? Seriously. People do that, and all sorts of other crazy things. See here: http://www.forbes.com/2002/08/07/0807sport.html
You might be surpriosed to learn that the most dangerous sport in the UK is fishing. Because people drown. So down with angling? Of course not. Because MY and other gatekeepers have decided that fishing has value, while smokers are disgusting–thousands of years of cross-cultural appreciation for tobacco notwithstanding. And ignoring the fact, of course, that the vast majority of people who take up smoking at some point in their lives survive the experience.
The obvious response is that not enough people launch themselves into the air or drown in fishing accidents for it to be a concern. But isn’t that a strange standard? We are going to hammer smokers harder and harder because… people like to smoke? Millions upon millions of people take the risk, meaning that they actually enjoy it. So let’s make sure people don’t, you know, do something they enjoy. Hell, why not put a huge tax on football helmets? That would probably convince more people to play soccer. Which is safer. Given MY’s reasoning, as a matter of public policy, that would make sense.
Creepy stuff, particularly from someone on the progressive/liberal end of the political spectrum.
January 28th, 2009 at 7:48 am
Why is it not legitimate to engage in something a little dangerous? And if it isn’t, shouldn’t we first try to keep people from doing the MOST dangerous things? If we are going to tax smoking, why not tax people who launch themselves into the air with a trebuchet? Seriously. People do that, and all sorts of other crazy things. See here: http://www.forbes.com/2002/08/07/0807sport.html
You might be surpriosed to learn that the most dangerous sport in the UK is fishing. Because people drown. So down with angling? Of course not. Because MY and other gatekeepers have decided that fishing has value, while smokers are disgusting–thousands of years of cross-cultural appreciation for tobacco notwithstanding. And ignoring the fact, of course, that the vast majority of people who take up smoking at some point in their lives survive the experience.
The obvious response is that not enough people launch themselves into the air or drown in fishing accidents for it to be a concern. But isn’t that a strange standard? We are going to hammer smokers harder and harder because… people like to smoke? Millions upon millions of people take the risk, meaning that they actually enjoy it. So let’s make sure people don’t, you know, do something they enjoy. Hell, why not put a huge tax on football helmets? That would probably convince more people to play soccer. Which is safer. Given MY’s reasoning, as a matter of public policy, that would make sense.
Creepy stuff, particularly from someone on the progressive/liberal end of the political spectrum.
January 28th, 2009 at 7:50 am
You know what’s weird? It’s when you get to be 55 and then one day you wonder, what if I had stayed up an hour later and actually had sex with that blonde when I was 19? Why didn’t I do it?
And then you realize that, if you had, everything would have been different. Everything that happened in the entire rest of your life would not have happened. And you probably wouldn’t give up all of that for one night with a floozy.
So just think about that the next time you’re ready to order a drink. Or do anything, for that matter. It’s mind-boggling.
January 28th, 2009 at 8:12 am
“The problem with this assertion is that this is true only for a small minority of drinkers. As others have asked, why should everyone have to pay for the sins of the few? Why not just fine the malefactors and leave the rest of us alone?”
This point has been made a number of times. The problem, as I understand it, is that there is a lot of evidence for the “single-distribution model” of alcohol consumption. That is, in any society the teetotalers, median drinker, and heavy drinkers all fall onto a single, more-or-less bell curve. Societies may have different average drinking rates and as a result have alcohol-use distributions that are shifted one way or another, with resulting more or fewer heavy drinkers.
Thus, it seems, the most effective way to reduce the number of heavy/problem drinkers is to reduce the average alcohol consumption of the society. This seems counterintuitive with regard to the irrational and uncontrollable nature of alcoholism, but many studies have borne this out.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:41 am
Unless you can link to it, I’ll assume that you heard this from some buzzed guy in a bar.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Once again, Don, your own experiences do not constitute a scientific report.
January 28th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Sam:
I wasn’t talking about secondhand smoke. I completely agree that secondhand smoke hysteria is extremely silly. I’m not talking about a “whiff,” i’m talking about smoking a cigarette.
You seem to have misunderstood my point, given the stuff about “why would someone quit after smoking for so long?”
Death from lung cancer is a risk that builds over time. Death from heart attack is like that to some degree, but there’s also an acute component. My risk of death from heart attack in the next five minutes is something, we’ll call it X. If I smoke a cigarette, my risk of dying in the next five minutes goes way up, maybe to 3X, but then at the end of five minutes it goes back down to X again. So if I smoke a thousand cigarettes my relative risk during the time I’m smoking is really high, but it goes down right away when I stop.
Now, it’s certainly true that just smoking one cigarette is not going to cause a heart attack, and of course it’s highly unlikely that I will die of a heart attack anyway because I’m 32. But it is a risk factor.
January 28th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Sam:
As someone who agrees, as far as I can tell, with the points you’re trying to make, allow me to make a friendly suggestion that you should probably adopt a bit less hysterical tone.
January 28th, 2009 at 10:15 am
@serial catowner
Actually, I wondered the next morning why I didn’t stay up an hour later the night before to have sex with that 19 year old floozy. And I’ve kept wondering “what was I thinking” for the past 40 years. And today at 59, I’d give it all up to have sex with her right now. Or maybe rather, her present-day 39 year old daughter, as her 19 year old grandaughter would be indecently young for me today
January 28th, 2009 at 10:21 am
I’m surprised no one has pointed out that alcohol IS heavily taxed. Federal taxes are going down, but in much of the country state taxes are going up! In some states about 50% of the price of booze is taxes. In Europe, generally taxes on alcohol is much lower. Don’t progressives want to be like Europeans? Lower the booze tax already. Why don’t you raise taxes on gas (since it is cheap right now) instead of alcohol.
Man, it looks like Matt stirred up a tempest.
January 28th, 2009 at 11:24 am
That’s another terrible idea. When trying to improve the quality of our lives through progressive ideas, progressives shouldn’t decide to try things EVERYONE will hate. It’s probably a good idea to try things that will work and that are POPULAR.
Otherwise, progressives won’t get to do anything anymore.
January 28th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
“allow me to make a friendly suggestion that you should probably adopt a bit less hysterical tone.”
Sure. Although I might note that this blog is hardly know for that sort of restraint. I think the newest entry from MY has a headline that includes the phrase, “O’Reilly is Stupid.”
I think someone who writes that way can handle a few barbs here and there. Besides, which words were all that intemperate?
January 28th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
There is an economic force at work in northern California. Mendocino County is thriving at this point. It’s green and grows in the ground. Maybe it’s time to change some things.
January 29th, 2009 at 7:47 pm
I have an idea: during what is soon going to be a depression, we should tax alcohol! That’ll lift the nation’s spirits! (No pun intended.) Um, no. When we have universal health care, my liquor consumption becomes the government’s business. ‘Till then, bottoms up!
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