‘Paying the Piper’

Kudos to The Times for its right-on editorial. It’s high time American politicians said yes to taxes on booze and tobacco, especially since poll after poll cites overwhelming support for these user/abuser “special” taxes, which largely have been unchanged for decades.

Self-reliance and fairness budgetary principles require that we now confront the hard realities, for example, of what inflation and the various liquor lobbies have done to excise tax rates on alcoholic beverages.

Your call for “making the beer and wine tax comparable to that on distilled spirits” is a crucial first step. With beer and wine comprising 78% and 16%, respectively, of all alcoholic beverage consumption, it makes no fiscal sense to continue the myth that the ethyl alcohol in them is somehow less harmful to our individual and collective health and safety then the so-called hard-stuff.

Beer, after all, is the “drug of choice” among Americans between the ages of 15-24 who succumb to their three leading causes of death: accidents, homicide, and suicide--all alcohol-related in most incidents. Also, beer is the booze most commonly implicated in “driving under the influence.”

Federally, beer and wine have been taxed, respectively, at 29 and 17 cents per gallon since 1951, with distilled spirits hiked finally in October of 1985 by a minuscule 19%. But your call now for an additional hike of 20% for spirits is ludicrous, given skyrocketing inflation since that second year of the Korean War. Equalizing beer and wine taxes to the comparable ethanol content in distilled spirits makes great sense when the spirits rate is first doubled--from $12.50 to $25 per gallon in order to determine the equivalent ethanol rate.

A can of beer, a glass of wine, and a shot of liquor all contain equivalent amounts of ethanol; yet their federal tax rates, respectively, are 2.7, 0.5, and 10 cents. With a six-pack of brew now costing what a six-pack of Coke does, why shouldn’t young people choose the cheaper fix? Our antiquated tax policies on our most common, legalized drug for adults have helped drive many of those young people to an early death and the beer and wine industries to a ravenous lust for profit and power.

In any case, 36 years after 1951, how many adults would feel aggrieved with the price of a six-pack of beer and a standard bottle of wine pegged $1.50 higher and a fifth of “hard” liquor up by $4? A third of Americans don’t drink any kind of alcoholic beverages. Another third imbibes three or fewer drinks a week. Among the final third, some might even choose to drink less, partly because of increased costs, partly because of their growing awareness of the health and safety implications.

Surely, the current $120 billion yearly national costs of alcohol problems would be noticeably lessened and the taxpayer substantially relieved were these adjustments made, including indexing these “sin taxes” to inflation.

RAY CHAVIRA

Chairman

Advisory Committee Policy

Americans for Substance Abuse

Prevention and Treatment

Lynwood