Also, in all seriousness, Matt often writes about the political palatability of various ideas, how they are sold to the public, and how that interacts with actually achieving real world policy victory.
I'll just say that "I'm going to double the price of your beer" is a massive political loser that would be immediately weaponized by the opposition.
I think "buck a beer" was a winning campaign slogan in Canada recently, by Rob Ford's equally populist brother complaining about nanny state liberals taxing your alcohol.
I'm sure they could work in some exemptions for distilleries that sell below X amount of beer a year, of course too many exemptions will just swallow the rule itself.
At least we should increase it on big companies like Budweiser, they aren't even American owned anymore!
Don’t have a lot of brainy stuff to add but I like that Matt references Kleinen and wish he would have done a deeper take on Kleinens criticism of our lack of alcohol regulations. I was persuaded by his illustrations of how much the alcohol industry is dependent on alcoholism, how your average neighborhood bar needs the neighborhood drunks and caters to them, how most of the advertising revenue in booze centers on the cheapest lowest quality stuff partly because that’s what alcoholics prefer, how there is a huge incentive to get people to drink as young as possible and this pervades advertising patterns and ought to be redirected away from young people through regulation. Simply his stat of x percent of alcohol is consumed by y percent of people, x being surprisingly big and y being surprisingly small was eye opening. I drink, but alcohol is bad and we shouldn’t be so skiddish about regulating it and taxing it to minimize its harms.
One thing that kind of blew my mind when I realized it, "light" beer is really designed and advertised for alcoholics who just want to be able to drink more alcohol, not for people watching their weight. Taste Great, Less Filling (so you can drink 15 of them).
Yup one of the fittest guys I know used to judiciously sip his one Michelob ultra all evening when out on the weekends but that ain’t funding much michelob ultra production it’s the guys who grab 3 six packs at the golf course and still need a refill at the turn sorry for my bougie example.
I really find this difficult to believe. Anyone who wants to seriously get drunk is just going to switch to hard liquor, or at a minimum, high-alcohol beers which are now very prevalent. Or mixing different types of booze (beer & wine, beer & liquor, etc.) A serious alcoholic is not going to get a real buzz off a 6 pack of Something Light
I think there is little widespread recognition of just how much some people drink. If you have a beer after work every day and then like 5 drinks on friday and saturday you are definitely drinking too much per health recommendations, that's drinking too much per health recs. The type of person who does that probably is thinking "I drink too much but raising the price of a beer by .25 cents would make no difference.
BUT apparently about 75% of the alcohol is consumed by the 10% of people who consume more than the person above. Someone who drinks 10+ drinks a day would surely have their consumption curtailed by a price hike of 25 cents per beer --we're talking about like 1,000/year. And surely it's in this area where you also see a disproportionate share of liquor related deaths. If I remember correctly even for drunk driving the lions share of deaths are from people who are at ~.15 BAC or higher which is very, very drunk.
Back when that "10% of drinkers drink 10 drinks a day" study came out, I looked into it. The survey that they gave people actually had the top 10% of drinkers saying that they had a more believable five drinks a day. However, the survey also was such that if you multiplied it out, it only accounted for about 50% of total alcohol purchased in the United States.
So the authors multiplied everyone's responses by two.
That... seems like a kind of dodgy methodology to me.
I haven't looked further into it to see if anyone has gathered additional evidence/addressed this objection/etc. But I think it's worth looking into before you take it as gospel.
Good critique, but I don't think it undermines the principle of the point even if it is just millions of people having 5 drinks a day.
Also, I would say the DOT stats above that show 70% of the drunk driving fatalities are from drivers at .15 or over indicates there is a HUGE amount of extremely heavy drinking. You need to have 7-8 drinks at a sitting to get to that level... the fact that this cause 6700 deaths in 2010 (sorry the old paper is what I found) indicates tons of people are drinking a lot.
If you are an occasional/moderate drinker I don't even think you'd think to drive after 8 drinks, I'm pretty sure I probably wouldn't be able to find my keys at that point.
I mean, if we said that 0.01% of drives where the person was blind drunk resulted in a fatality, then 6,700 deaths would be 67,000,000 drives in one year. You clearly do not need to have 24M of people getting that drunk each and every day of the year in order to result in 67M drives per year.
Another way to slice it is that on average you get one death per 100 million miles driven-- if .15 drunk driving is 100x more dangerous than average that means 1 death per million miles... 67,000,000 very drunk miles driven. If an average trip is like 4 miles, that would mean 17,000,000 trips, I suppose that could be as few as a million people or less who are making those trips.
In my experience, most people who drink too much are aware in at least some rough sense of how much their habit is costing them financially, and many make periodic attempts (successful or not) to reduce the amount they drink. I find it very plausible that they'll make these attempts more often and more vigorously when alcohol is more expensive.
Some states make it harder to by alcohol than others. In Maryland, for example, you can only buy liquor at what are essentially state-run dispensaries, while in Wisconsin it's available at gas stations. I wonder if there's any evidence of what effect if any those differences have.
Lots of states have weird laws about alcohol like how in Mass. you have to buy everything, including beer at a specific liquor store, and how in South Carolina you used to have to get liquor in small bottles. I also wonder how this affects public health outcomes.
Yeah, the wild variety in state-to-state regulations really should make it possible to see effects.
Some places you can buy wine and beer at the grocery, other places beer but not wine. I have never lived in a state that sold hard liquor at groceries, but there probably are some.
What are the effects?
Laboratories of democracy, etc. -- I hope someone is running the studies.
I mean maybe. But one likely effect is that people will cross state lines more often. My dad's cousins would visit Ohio once a month to load up on booze back when the drinking age in Ohio was a year younger than Pennsylvania. Clouding the data a bit.
Even better! Now you can do county-level analyses comparing border counties to inland counties. And counties that adjoin a state with more liberal laws, to counties that adjoin a more restrictive state.
You oversimplify MA. Gas stations and supermarkets etc. can get a beer & wine license, though there's a limit on how many licenses one firm can own/control (to the point that it's pretty common for a husband and wife to each own 4 stores...)
All I really care about in Massachusetts is that Louie's wouldn't sell to me when I tried to use a fake ID. "This isn't you." Sigh. I thought the whole point of a campus area liquor store was that you would sell to anyone!
In Texas and Wyoming there are drive-through liquor stores. Which is *almost* a good idea. Connecticut used to require grocery stores to put a curtain across the beer refrigerators on Sunday mornings - I imagine the idea was to remove temptation when you were supposed to be on your way to church.
A few Scandinavian countries have the same system.
It's worth noting that America has quite strict alcohol laws relative to other first world countries generally (for instance you can only be alcohol over 21), but also quite high crime rates relative to those countries, so I doubt it's the dominant factor.
As someone pointed out to me, other countries have low *murder* rates compared to the US, but it's so hard to get apples to apples comparisons for crime broadly, that is pretty difficult to say whether they have low *crime*.
Yeah, crime is hard to compare so people normally just compare homicide. But unless a country is full of professional assassins, I would imagine there's a pretty strong correlation between murder rate and assault rate.
Harder to tell for other crimes like theft, and differing attitudes make comparisons about sexual crimes between countries hard.
I don't know if I 100% believe this, but it's plausible that the prevalence of guns in the US turns more assaults into murders than other countries. Or different kinds of assaults or whatever.
It so happens that this was discussed on another thread. The fatality rate for gunshot wounds is something like 30-40%, and stabbing is in the single digits. And that’s probably an undercount for gunshot lethality because the stats are for torso wounds only to avoid confounds with suicide.
On the other hand, I think you're a lot more likely to miss entirely with a gun than a knife. And there's also blunt force trauma, which might be less likely to be fatal but also less possible for medical attention to avert the fatality of if it does cross the line -- so how quickly do you get medical attention?
That's generally the case, but the relatively differences in availability of guns between the US and European countries injects a HUGE amount of noise into that comparison.
I think JR was suggesting that murder rate (generally highly reported across all jurisdictions) correlates with the true rate of "people trying to hurt each other," not of charged assaults.
I think you can infer the assault rate from the murder rate, but not the other way around. Or at least you can do that between different US jurisdictions for rough apples-to-apples comparisons. But as I said below, you can't do that between the US and Europe because of the massive differences in gun ownership.
Yes, I think so, relative to both rest of Europe and the US.
It would be a pain to do all the necessary conversions to compare alcohol taxes between US and Euro countries (different bands of drink, different measures of alcoholic strength, different volumes, different currencies), but yes, I believe they are.
Still if the point of higher alcohol taxes is to discourage drinking, but Europeans drink more than Americans...
It's at least worth noting that a country like Germany can have relatively liberal drinking laws, low alcohol taxes relative to rest of Europe, high alcohol consumption on a world scale, and still be a pretty low crime and low homicide country.
There’s some other differences between the US and Germany. Germany has comprehensive and affordable public transit, so people drink and don’t drive. There’s low prevalence of guns and even knives, so theft and assault don’t carry the risk of murder no matter how drunk the perpetrator is.
When I lived in Germany, I bought beer often. It was cheap, excellent, and you could get it anywhere. However, I don’t think I bought liquor even once. Maybe a shot at a bar here and there, but there’s not much liquor or wine drinking in a lot of these European countries. It’s certainly not sold at grocery stores, gas stations, and bodegas. I think the prevalence of hard alcohol consumption in the US probably compounds our drinking problem along with the necessity of a car and the prevalence of guns.
>>>I think the prevalence of hard alcohol consumption in the US<<<
Do we in fact know it to be the case that the US is characterized by a "prevalence of hard alcohol" consumption? WHO maintains the US is 45th overall in alcohol consumption and 67th in the percentage of alcohol consumed in the form of hard liquor.
In Maryland, only a few counties run monopoly stores and they are owned by the county rather than the states. Elsewhere, except for a few grandfathered megastores, the size of liquor outlets are limited which gives distributors a strong upper hand over the largely mom-and-pop retail system.
The biggest Maryland related law is the lack of beer and wine sales at grocery stores. It is always a reminder that I am in DC or Virginia when I walk into a Trader Joe's and see a Two Buck Chuck aisle.
Also true between European countries (counting Scotland as a separate country from England for this purpose).
There are big tax-rate variations between countries here as well. Luxembourg has notably low rates, which results in a lot of people travelling there from all three surrounding countries to buy alcohol (and tobacco).
France is cheap compared to England (yes, I mean England, not Britain), which resulted in the "booze cruise" where people drive onto a ferry or the Tunnel, go to one of the massive hypermarchés in Calais, fill up their car with booze, and drive home with six months or a year's worth - or else with enough for a large event (lots of weddings were catered this way). Brexit has killed this off; bringing more than 18 litres (two cases) of wine involves paying alcohol duty - the saving is now less than the price of a ticket. The old limit was 90 litres (ten cases) per person and you could bring more if you could produce evidence that you were bringing it for personal use (e.g a wedding booking).
There are other borders that have similar phenomena, but without the water barrier making crossing the border expensive, people tend to go more frequently and buy smaller quantities, so you don't get the massive purchases that Brits went for in France.
Still, there are plenty of big alcohol-specialist shops on one side of most European borders.
Also in Wisconsin, teenagers accompanied by their parents can be served alcohol in restaurants. They love their alcohol in Wisconsin. Even have a baseball team named after it. Most people say it's legacy of all the German immigrants.
Not teenagers - minors. Although, it is up to the discretion of the establishment.
Legend has it that the existence of the Green Bay Packers is due in large part to Prohibition not being rigorously enforced in parts of the state, so other NFL teams didn't mind visiting Green Bay in the early days of the league.
I moved this year from Washington (hard liquor in grocery stores) to Wyoming (if it’s alcoholic, it’s sold in a liquor store—which are ubiquitous and may include a drive-through). My understanding is that Wyoming has a higher rate of alcohol abuse, but that may be linked to rural loneliness.
As a heavy drinker with disposable income, this wouldn't deter me. It didn't when I lived in Stockholm where prices are nearly double. Let's call that "lived experience" rather than anecdote for more credibility.
To some extent the spirits tax premium is working as intended; it's harder to get acute alcohol poisoning from hard seltzer than straight liquor, so the tax on spirits is higher to reflect its higher negative externalities. We'd probably want keep a pattern like that as we raise taxes.
It's harder to get alcohol poisoning from hard seltzer than hard liquor but it's not easier to get alcohol poisoning from hard hard seltzer than a mixture of hard liquor and seltzer water with an equivalent ABV. Ideally I think you would just want to levy a tax on total volume of ethyl alcohol regardless of it's form.
You can dilute vodka down, you can't distill white claw up. The form definitely matters, which means it makes sense to tax liquor at a higher per ethyl-mol rate than beer. How much more is up to the economists. Or to be realistic, industry lobbyists.
Yes but we don’t care and no won else does. Israel Palestine is all over news in a way that China Weager is not. Or Myanmar Rohinga. As for the USA we do business with Saudi Arabia and China and we give aid Ethiopia as the portion of its economy as Israel. Being moral or just is a requirement to business with the USA
The US decline is worse that you think. I think it has to be deprioritized to what it was pre world war 1 when it was basically 0. The USA is simply not in a position to care. The USA cannot tell China or Israel what to do any more than Canada can. We unfortunately need to decide who our friends are based on what they do for us and how reliable they are, not how good they are. America's position in the world is about where it was in the 1860-1900's. Yea we are an important local power in North America, but for the rest of the world we have no choice but to partner with not nice countries like Tsarist Russia to counter balance the UK. We didn't have to option of telling Tsarist Russia stop the Circassian genocide or we wont have you to counterbalance the UK during the Civil War. All we got for watching that and saying was a few Russian ships visiting out ports, and Alaska. And the USA had to prop up little countries that served US interests that did bad things, the USA had to do bad things its self or be left out of the global system of Imperialism. Fighting for Human rights was something the USA had power to do from 1945 till about 2005. We don't have the power to do that anymore. Matts book 1 billion Americans offers a path that gives the the USA the power to look out for human rights. But, accepting that 10 million immigrants a year will never happen mean accepting the USA wont have the power to fight for anything other than its own survival. Every other time you have multiple world powers no one can fight for human rights. It is depressing I want to drink but oh the taxes.
I agree with your moral argument. But international power is relative. The USA isn’t the biggest economy in the world anymore. Australia is a rich country but if they make waves about human rights China stomps on them. Unless we do the 1 billion Americans or merge with the EU we are just one of many countries. Hence why I need to drink before we raise taxes on it.
Strong nanny state vibes on this one. Part of being a free human being with agency is being able to make bad choices. There are plenty of things that are good for people what we don’t compel or incentivize through taxation/subsidy.
Isn't every law a "nanny state intervention?" Laws either proscribe what one can do or require one to do something rather than leaving one with unfettered agency. Seems rather than just saying something is "nanny state intervention" as if that should end the debate, each particular state intervention needs to be weighed on its own merits.
Why does it seem like where we are now is the optimal place to be, though? That's what all the stuff about how alcohol use is implicated in crime is about. Crime is extremely expensive, so at the current margin, there are a lot of negative externalities to drinking that should be internalized in the form of a tax.
I think Yglesias says that if we look at our broader drug laws, most of them should be backed off a bit, but a few should be tightened. That's how most people have felt about cannabis and tobacco over the past few years, and it probably extends to hallucinogens and alcohol as well.
Yes. Banning alcohol is probably bad, and we should "step back" before we re-implement prohibition. Commonsense health regulations and Pigouvian taxes improve well-being, though, on net.
Well sure - at some point you have to step back. But I think its reasonable to tax at some level things that have negative externalities more things that don't.
You also have to pick something to tax, whether it's sales, real estate, income, etc. To the extent you're taxing any of those things you're also dis-incentivizing them
Nanny state rules prevent you from making bad choices for yourself. This doesn't stop you from drinking, you just have to pay more. Also, it's meant to protect society from you, not you from yourself.
I'm less interventionist than Matt. Rather than micromanaging businesses and arbitrary rules telling people what they can and can't do, I prefer using price mechanisms in well-defined ways that are not easily game-able. Alcohol tax fits this pattern.
Plenty of things I think are objectively bad (being overweight, divorce, being mean, driving slowly in the left lane). Doesn't mean I think we need to establish taxes on them.
Again, it's a matter of degree vs kind here, but I think Matty (and many technocratic types) err on the side of too much state intervention. Just my 2c.
One thing I find funny in the US is the perseverance of this puritanical streak in the culture and how it affects things like drinking. This is purely anecdotal, but it always seemed to me that the more prevalent the conservatism is in a society when it comes to alcohol, the higher the percentage of risky drinking behavior is relative to total alcohol consumption.
This is almost the antithesis of what Matt is advocating for (and I agree with him, for the record) but what earthly reason is there to have the legal drinking age set at 21?
As opposed to raising it to 25 or 30? I would be in favor of those.
Assuming you mean vs. 18, it significantly reduces drunk driving deaths among young people. Not to mention reducing binge drinking. I'm taking this study at face value, but it seems pretty logical: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20497803/
Your bigger point about the culture being different is a good one, to be fair; I was just harping on the risks *within the US*. Europe generally seems to attack the problem of youth drunk driving on the driving side rather than the drinking side, with a higher minimum driving age and just more stringent licensing criteria.
On the drink driving thing, there's basically no country where you need to be more than 18 to drive a car though, and even in most of Europe you can't buy alcohol until you're 18.
Though it's probably a lot more common to get your licence later or to not even get one in parts of Europe than the US.
I think there's a good argument to make the ages at which you can drive and buy alcohol *not the same age", for obvious reasons, whichever direction you go with this.
The tighter licensing rules for driving, combined with the absence of drivers' ed in schools, and the tight restrictions on the use of a learners' permit (in many countries you can only legally drive on a learners' permit with a qualified instructor in a dual-control vehicle) are a much bigger factor than the age rules, I think.
Even if you get the permit on your 18th birthday, it's still likely to be a year or so before you pass your test and have a full licence.
And most Europeans can start drinking before they are 18 - it's legal for parents to buy alcohol and supply it to their children either without an age limit or after five in almost all of Europe. Having a glass of wine or a beer with a meal is pretty common even for pre-teens and certainly for teens.
Admittedly, international comparisons are always tricky because there are so many things to control for. Clearly though, there are mitigating factors in Europe, that lead to generally better public health and safety outcomes. I think it’s fair to assume that culture is one of them, but the impact of regulation is probably higher. Again, this is mostly conjecture.
The point I was originally making is borne out of my experience growing up in an Arab country where the vast majority of the population didn’t drink, but most of my friends who snuck around to drink (Muslim and Christian) seemed to engage in far riskier drinking than most of my friends who had a relaxed attitude towards it (Muslim and Christian).
They always say it's to stop drinking and driving, but it would be far more sensible to raise the driving age to 25 and lower the drinking age to 18, so that there is a guaranteed demand for ways to get back home after drinking without driving, which can then offer the same service to over-25s as well and lower drinking and driving.
Driving meets a meaningful need in most people's lives. Delaying it 9 years because some subset of the population drinks and drives does not seem a more sensible solution to me. You're essentially punishing the 35%+ of the population that doesn't drink for something they don't do.
Driving is an economic, social and environmental disaster; if I could abolish it entirely, I would. No-one should ever need to drive and anyone that does is living in a society that is ableist and anti-human.
I'll make the assumption that you think we should all live in incredibly dense cities with subways for internal traffic and rail for travel between them. There should be nobody who lives in suburbs or rural areas where travel by car is the logical way to travel. Which is a view you can hold of course, but doesn't apply in any way to the current reality nor one that exists in the foreseeable future.
Either that, or don't start living that far from other people until we invent self-driving cars.
I have to confess that the enormous level of discomfort I have at the idea of living in a rural or suburban area may be causing me to have a rather stronger reaction against that weird alternative lifestyle than is perhaps common.
Just delete the word "incredibly". A neighborhood doesn't have to be incredibly dense to have some walkable shops and usable transit - a dozen housing units per acre seems sufficient, which still allows a majority of housing units to be detached.
Because the transportation system on the US is entirely based on cars. Raising the age from 18 to 21 gives kids another 3 years to get better at driving before adding alcohol to the mix. Also, if it’s legal for 18 year olds to buy, the kids who turn 18 while in high school will be buying for their younger friends.
1. Different populations have different risk levels for alcoholism. There is a lot of evidence to support contention that different ethnicity are at greater risk of being alcoholics. https://www.nature.com/articles/4001811. Both in Ireland and in the diaspora, Irish alcoholism rates really are elevated.
2. JamesC's point about drinking ages apply.
3. Cost of alcohol/ease of access. Greater livability of alcohol increases consumption and alcoholism.
Our drinking age is an international outlier, but I think a lot of fairly libertine countries also have quite high alcohol taxes. The data would be a nightmare to assemble, though.
I'm not sure alcohol consumption is as price elastic as the article infers it is. We have Prohibition as a case study in the extreme. And alcohol purchases conform to the 80/20 rule in that 20% of the customers account for at least 80% of sales (I can't find the exact statistics, but they are startling) which means that compulsive, if not addicted, customers are the core of the industry.
The cost benefit ratio of sin taxes is always complicated. For one, it gives government a financial incentive. Privatizing liquor sales where they are state controlled is always steeped in revenue loss arguments. Also the beneficial health effects of decreasing alcohol consumption would increase government health costs as lives are extended. A grim trade-off but one that has kept tobacco taxes from becoming even more punitive.
Finally, alcohol taxes are based on volume of alcohol not price, which adds to the regressiveness of those taxes since a bottle of Blantons is taxed as much as rotgut whiskey. So it's all more complex than just raising taxes on booze, which is still not a terrible idea.
"We have Prohibition as a case study in the extreme"
Yes, and Prohibition worked. The pervasive myth that it was some kind of epic failure is some serious retconning of history. It took 14 years for Prohibition to be repealed....because it had such broad based popularity. Prohibition cut cirrhosis deaths in the US by 65%. Admission to hospitals for alcoholic psychosis fell by 53%. Arrests for drunk & disorderly conduct fell by 50%. Estimates are that alcohol consumption fell by 30-50% nationwide. After Prohibition was repealed, the cultural change of lower drinking persisted: per-capita consumption was less than half what it had been before Prohibition.
Even today, America is widely known as having a less alcohol-centric culture compared to places like the UK or Germany or Russia. That's a direct consequence of Prohibition's lasting social & cultural changes over 100 years later.
I'm not a Prohibitionist but my eyes were opened when I read about 19th Century drinking. Drinking was off the charts and causing enormous social problems, including domestic violence. The later was why prohibitionism was more common among women.
Alcohol may not be eliminated but making reducing the place of alcohol in the culture is a good thing. At a minimum I'd like to see a push to remove alcohol from offices and government functions such as state dinners.
Worth noting that Matt specifically advocates changing the alcohol tax to an ad valorem tax instead of by volume.
Everything you say about Pigouvian taxes is true, but I'm not sure that they're worse than the distortions caused by taxing something that you think is actually good. If we tax the stuff we want less of and as a result the revenue goes away, I would take that win. The true worst case, as in Prohibition case, is not that elasticity will be too low but that we'll get a lot of evasion and a black market instead.
This is a famous one, although I think it’s pretty misleading since it’s just a survey of what people drank over the last week. It makes the distribution appear way more skewed than it really is.
Also, anyone know what the comment hyperlink code is?
That would be instictive response as well, I'd be really curious to see how elastic the demand is among the the high consumption segement - I can't really tell from the CDC table that Matt included.
I think the public health benefits of reduced alcohol consumption are obvious, but then again that's true for gun-control so I am less clear on how you make a viabe political case for this.
I would be curious to see as well how much higher taxes would just cause heavy drinkers to substitute towards cheaper alcohol rather than reduce overall consumption. Especially given the correlation between alcohol consumption and income.
Can you please write an article about something we should tax LESS? The persistent theme here is, "we spent $1MM here, but we should have spent $1B there." Is there a thing you don't want to tax?
One of the reasons to be wealthier is that a smaller % can actually equal more money. For example - we're at ~27% of tax revenue to GPD compared to Canada at 32%. However, GPD per capita being at 68.3k vs 51.7k for the US vs Canada means we actually have 18.4k to their 16.6k per person in tax revenue.
This is such a perverse point of view. Services should be better in the US. We should have good healthcare, cheap higher education, and a decent welfare state. If that requires tax money, then sure, tax me!
We don't offer any of those services. So...I don't want to be taxed more. Because I receive nothing in return.
There's a tariff on lumber imported from Canada; Matt thinks the US should drop it.
Here's a detailed proposal for Canadian tariff reductions, from Mike Moffatt. He points out that there's a number of tariffs which collect very little revenue, but which impose a significant paperwork burden on small businesses which happen to import one of the affected goods. https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/mowatcentre/making-it-simple/
I would think that Matt would want to eliminate a lot of the tax incentives, in effect increasing taxes, around building houses. Now condos and apartment highrises, different story, but more just zoning.
Some states have lots of fees for various public services -- getting your license renewed, getting your vehicle registered, and whatnot. These fees can be surprisingly high!
I 100% support decreasing those, and I bet my fellow tax-and-spend liberals (like MY) agree.
I think we should make a national id that could be used as a DL (and voting) that is free and provided for all citizens. We should increase vehicle registration fees to cover electric cars not paying gas taxes.
I simply don't believe that heavy drinkers can be so easily dissuaded from drinking, and forcing light/moderate drinkers to cut back for some vague minor public health benefits is the definition of nanny state. Heavy drinkers are addicts, and we have tons of info about how addicts behave if you make it more difficult to get their fix! They can homebrew or make bathtub/prison booze, they can drink rubbing alcohol or cologne (met a woman from Iran who told me people did this in her country), and of course they can establish a black market. There's a black market in cigarettes for God's sake!
And the politics of it are awful- big Bloomberg soda tax energy, which I don't recall as being particularly successful or popular. Especially coming from the Dems, who already have a nanny state reputation
There will always be a continuum. Some heavy drinkers on the edge of addiction will scale back, some will never start in the first place. We can also look to studies that show it would hardly be a "vague minor benefit":
"A meta-analysis of 50 publications found that doubling the alcohol excise tax would reduce alcohol-related mortality by an average of 35%, traffic crash deaths by 11%, sexually transmitted disease by 6%, violence by 2%, and crime by 1.4%."
The biggest effect here is going to be on high-functioning problem drinkers, who generally aren't doing things like drinking rubbing alcohol. I've had a lot of experience with these folks and they're definitely sensitive to the price of alcohol. A binge for a lot of them isn't necessarily a pre-planned thing; it's the impulse buy of a second six-pack that ends up leading to a four-day bender.
Appreciate your concerns but believe there is decent evidence that increasing the per unit price of alcohol in Eastern Europe had a large effect on young people dying of alcohol poisoning and dangerous behavior related to alcohol maybe someone knows the references, and that alcoholics are more sensitive to per unit increases in alcohol costs than u might think, and moderate drinkers not so much, and if that were true would it change your mind? I think it is true but I also think I’m a bit lazy and have no idea how all these commenters cite reference papers and statistics all over their comments like how does one motivate themselves in this way teach me!
They work. "The study used five years of data collected from Berkeley, California, the first U.S. city to tax those drinks, and found a 52% decrease in soda consumption in the first three years since the tax was implemented."
The biggest issue is consumers look for substitutes because they crave sugar. I have a very bad sweet tooth. To make soda taxes more effective they need to be converted into sugar taxes.
That way consumers will reduce sugar consumption which is the real harm
Moderate drinker here but I think Matt is right about this. Anecdatally, I know a quite a few people who drink to the extent that it interferes with their day-to-day lives, often significantly, and my understanding is that many non-crime social issues are also greatly exacerbated by/widely attributable to alcohol abuse.
My maternal grandfather was a hardcore alcoholic, which stressed the family considerably, especially my mother (the youngest of a large Irish brood), who often had to pick up the pieces since her mother was often disabled with rheumatoid arthritis. I consider myself lucky to be a lightweight and extremely hangover-prone.
"Certain things have seen their prices rise much faster than the rate of overall inflation — that’s normally labor-intensive services like child care and education. Other things, mostly related to computers, have gotten much cheaper. Alcoholic beverages are about average."
So, the alcohol moderates the rise in the total cost of college professors who drink a lot. A classic case of the Baumoholic Cost Disease.
There may be a strong pushback with legitimate consistency arguments from the libertarian left/right/whatever backed by the alcohol lobby if more alcohol taxes/regulations coming at a time of marijuana legalization.
For instance, I live in Pennsylvania where currently beer can only be sold in speciality shops and liquor can only be sold by the state owned stores. Taxes get raised on alcohol adding a new inconvenience to consuming it. At the same time, I may soon be able to buy a pack of spliffs at the grocery store (so long as they’re not menthol). Do we really need this many particularisms when all we’re trying to do is get a buzz on somehow and forget we work for the man?
I don’t oppose marijuana legalization. At the same time, I do think marijuana can perpetuate negative trends of our culture much like alcohol despite it generally being safer. For instance, if one of my kids had to transgress as a young adult with either marijuana or alcohol, I would have to say “depends on who they are.” If they were a basement dweller addicted to video games, I’d rather not introduce weed into that equation. Would likely only perpetuate the current state.
Why would that be the scenario? What do you think would be the result of a video game addicted young adult drinking versus the result if they used week instead?
Alcohol would likely effect their ability to function well in game and score phat lewtz. The more mellow vide of marijuana can be compatible with extended game sessions where thumb twitches are required, especially on longer dragon raids.
Are you assuming the kid isn't predisposed to alcohol addiction? If they are, then the potential outcome even for the basement dweller is much, much worse. It seems to me that the worst-case scenario for alcohol is so bad that it outweighs almost all other things you'd consider when weighing the two against each other.
Nope didn’t assume that at all! Totally think it’s a great idea to give someone predisposed to alcohol addiction a shitload of booze when they could have smoked a joint and ordered a pizza instead...
cmon man! Hehe. For the purposes of completeness... you have a point.
Although for spliffs specifically we have the health issue of tobacco but in general if we can get people to substitute weed for alcohol that would be good.
A lot of grocery stores in PA sell beer and wine. Establishments that sell food have long been allowed to sell beer "off-premises" i.e., takeout, and I could be wrong but believe I remember hearing that's how grocery stores in PA have managed to get licenses to sell alcohol, under the fiction they're technically restaurants because they sell some prepared food. It's not anything very logical, such as that the PA legislature decided to rationalize the rules for sale of alcohol in the state, that's for sure.
Yeah! I’ve noticed that too. And like it’s a separate part of the grocery store that has its own register lol. Most efficient way is to have one of husband/wife get food while the other gets beer :D
I own a craft distillery and this is the by far worst Yglesias take I've ever seen. I'm just being objective.
Also, in all seriousness, Matt often writes about the political palatability of various ideas, how they are sold to the public, and how that interacts with actually achieving real world policy victory.
I'll just say that "I'm going to double the price of your beer" is a massive political loser that would be immediately weaponized by the opposition.
It's been tried. Jacking up consumption taxes is generally pretty popular, or at least not SO unpopular as to cause political problems.
Popular with the Clinton and Bush administrations, and also tons of state legislatures.
Now, hiking the gas tax at the pump, THAT is unpopular.
elm
voters, unlike drunks, are not politically committed to the god-given right to drive under the influence
I think "buck a beer" was a winning campaign slogan in Canada recently, by Rob Ford's equally populist brother complaining about nanny state liberals taxing your alcohol.
Ontarian here... buck a beer wasn’t about taxes, but about lowering the per-bottle price floor.
And it wasn’t really a factor in him winning IMO
You said this better than I did, wish I'd read your comment first :)
Well pulling people away from the cheap low quality stuff and over toward the pricier artisanal stuff might be just the nudge your business needs!
As someone who doesn’t drink I think this is a great take. I am Totally objective lol.
I'm sure they could work in some exemptions for distilleries that sell below X amount of beer a year, of course too many exemptions will just swallow the rule itself.
At least we should increase it on big companies like Budweiser, they aren't even American owned anymore!
Don’t have a lot of brainy stuff to add but I like that Matt references Kleinen and wish he would have done a deeper take on Kleinens criticism of our lack of alcohol regulations. I was persuaded by his illustrations of how much the alcohol industry is dependent on alcoholism, how your average neighborhood bar needs the neighborhood drunks and caters to them, how most of the advertising revenue in booze centers on the cheapest lowest quality stuff partly because that’s what alcoholics prefer, how there is a huge incentive to get people to drink as young as possible and this pervades advertising patterns and ought to be redirected away from young people through regulation. Simply his stat of x percent of alcohol is consumed by y percent of people, x being surprisingly big and y being surprisingly small was eye opening. I drink, but alcohol is bad and we shouldn’t be so skiddish about regulating it and taxing it to minimize its harms.
One thing that kind of blew my mind when I realized it, "light" beer is really designed and advertised for alcoholics who just want to be able to drink more alcohol, not for people watching their weight. Taste Great, Less Filling (so you can drink 15 of them).
Yup one of the fittest guys I know used to judiciously sip his one Michelob ultra all evening when out on the weekends but that ain’t funding much michelob ultra production it’s the guys who grab 3 six packs at the golf course and still need a refill at the turn sorry for my bougie example.
I really find this difficult to believe. Anyone who wants to seriously get drunk is just going to switch to hard liquor, or at a minimum, high-alcohol beers which are now very prevalent. Or mixing different types of booze (beer & wine, beer & liquor, etc.) A serious alcoholic is not going to get a real buzz off a 6 pack of Something Light
I think there is little widespread recognition of just how much some people drink. If you have a beer after work every day and then like 5 drinks on friday and saturday you are definitely drinking too much per health recommendations, that's drinking too much per health recs. The type of person who does that probably is thinking "I drink too much but raising the price of a beer by .25 cents would make no difference.
BUT apparently about 75% of the alcohol is consumed by the 10% of people who consume more than the person above. Someone who drinks 10+ drinks a day would surely have their consumption curtailed by a price hike of 25 cents per beer --we're talking about like 1,000/year. And surely it's in this area where you also see a disproportionate share of liquor related deaths. If I remember correctly even for drunk driving the lions share of deaths are from people who are at ~.15 BAC or higher which is very, very drunk.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think-you-drink-a-lot-this-chart-will-tell-you/
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811654
Back when that "10% of drinkers drink 10 drinks a day" study came out, I looked into it. The survey that they gave people actually had the top 10% of drinkers saying that they had a more believable five drinks a day. However, the survey also was such that if you multiplied it out, it only accounted for about 50% of total alcohol purchased in the United States.
So the authors multiplied everyone's responses by two.
That... seems like a kind of dodgy methodology to me.
I haven't looked further into it to see if anyone has gathered additional evidence/addressed this objection/etc. But I think it's worth looking into before you take it as gospel.
Good critique, but I don't think it undermines the principle of the point even if it is just millions of people having 5 drinks a day.
Also, I would say the DOT stats above that show 70% of the drunk driving fatalities are from drivers at .15 or over indicates there is a HUGE amount of extremely heavy drinking. You need to have 7-8 drinks at a sitting to get to that level... the fact that this cause 6700 deaths in 2010 (sorry the old paper is what I found) indicates tons of people are drinking a lot.
If you are an occasional/moderate drinker I don't even think you'd think to drive after 8 drinks, I'm pretty sure I probably wouldn't be able to find my keys at that point.
I mean, if we said that 0.01% of drives where the person was blind drunk resulted in a fatality, then 6,700 deaths would be 67,000,000 drives in one year. You clearly do not need to have 24M of people getting that drunk each and every day of the year in order to result in 67M drives per year.
Another way to slice it is that on average you get one death per 100 million miles driven-- if .15 drunk driving is 100x more dangerous than average that means 1 death per million miles... 67,000,000 very drunk miles driven. If an average trip is like 4 miles, that would mean 17,000,000 trips, I suppose that could be as few as a million people or less who are making those trips.
In my experience, most people who drink too much are aware in at least some rough sense of how much their habit is costing them financially, and many make periodic attempts (successful or not) to reduce the amount they drink. I find it very plausible that they'll make these attempts more often and more vigorously when alcohol is more expensive.
Yeah and we tax anyway might as well tax bad things.
Some states make it harder to by alcohol than others. In Maryland, for example, you can only buy liquor at what are essentially state-run dispensaries, while in Wisconsin it's available at gas stations. I wonder if there's any evidence of what effect if any those differences have.
Lots of states have weird laws about alcohol like how in Mass. you have to buy everything, including beer at a specific liquor store, and how in South Carolina you used to have to get liquor in small bottles. I also wonder how this affects public health outcomes.
Yeah, the wild variety in state-to-state regulations really should make it possible to see effects.
Some places you can buy wine and beer at the grocery, other places beer but not wine. I have never lived in a state that sold hard liquor at groceries, but there probably are some.
What are the effects?
Laboratories of democracy, etc. -- I hope someone is running the studies.
I mean maybe. But one likely effect is that people will cross state lines more often. My dad's cousins would visit Ohio once a month to load up on booze back when the drinking age in Ohio was a year younger than Pennsylvania. Clouding the data a bit.
Even better! Now you can do county-level analyses comparing border counties to inland counties. And counties that adjoin a state with more liberal laws, to counties that adjoin a more restrictive state.
Data paradise!
Washington sells hard liquor at grocery stores and has for nearly a decade now. It was part of a Costco-sponsored ballot measure.
You oversimplify MA. Gas stations and supermarkets etc. can get a beer & wine license, though there's a limit on how many licenses one firm can own/control (to the point that it's pretty common for a husband and wife to each own 4 stores...)
I seem to recall once shopping at one of the few Trader Joe's in the state of Massachusetts that had the wine license!
All I really care about in Massachusetts is that Louie's wouldn't sell to me when I tried to use a fake ID. "This isn't you." Sigh. I thought the whole point of a campus area liquor store was that you would sell to anyone!
Yeah, not allowing stores to sell liquor to underage buyers with fake licenses --
total nanny-state move. We must throw off the chains, man!
In Texas and Wyoming there are drive-through liquor stores. Which is *almost* a good idea. Connecticut used to require grocery stores to put a curtain across the beer refrigerators on Sunday mornings - I imagine the idea was to remove temptation when you were supposed to be on your way to church.
Would be interesting to know.
A few Scandinavian countries have the same system.
It's worth noting that America has quite strict alcohol laws relative to other first world countries generally (for instance you can only be alcohol over 21), but also quite high crime rates relative to those countries, so I doubt it's the dominant factor.
As someone pointed out to me, other countries have low *murder* rates compared to the US, but it's so hard to get apples to apples comparisons for crime broadly, that is pretty difficult to say whether they have low *crime*.
Yeah, crime is hard to compare so people normally just compare homicide. But unless a country is full of professional assassins, I would imagine there's a pretty strong correlation between murder rate and assault rate.
Harder to tell for other crimes like theft, and differing attitudes make comparisons about sexual crimes between countries hard.
I don't know if I 100% believe this, but it's plausible that the prevalence of guns in the US turns more assaults into murders than other countries. Or different kinds of assaults or whatever.
It so happens that this was discussed on another thread. The fatality rate for gunshot wounds is something like 30-40%, and stabbing is in the single digits. And that’s probably an undercount for gunshot lethality because the stats are for torso wounds only to avoid confounds with suicide.
On the other hand, I think you're a lot more likely to miss entirely with a gun than a knife. And there's also blunt force trauma, which might be less likely to be fatal but also less possible for medical attention to avert the fatality of if it does cross the line -- so how quickly do you get medical attention?
It's a complex subject.
Oh yeah that would certainly be true come to think of it. Far more likely a confrontation escalates into lethal violence if guns are involved.
That's generally the case, but the relatively differences in availability of guns between the US and European countries injects a HUGE amount of noise into that comparison.
>>>I would imagine there's a pretty strong correlation between murder rate and assault rate.<<<
I wouldn't bet on it. A bar fight that merits a police caution in one jurisdiction could be felony assault in another.
I think JR was suggesting that murder rate (generally highly reported across all jurisdictions) correlates with the true rate of "people trying to hurt each other," not of charged assaults.
I think you can infer the assault rate from the murder rate, but not the other way around. Or at least you can do that between different US jurisdictions for rough apples-to-apples comparisons. But as I said below, you can't do that between the US and Europe because of the massive differences in gun ownership.
The alcohol taxes in Scandinavian countries must be quite high, no?
Yes, I think so, relative to both rest of Europe and the US.
It would be a pain to do all the necessary conversions to compare alcohol taxes between US and Euro countries (different bands of drink, different measures of alcoholic strength, different volumes, different currencies), but yes, I believe they are.
Still if the point of higher alcohol taxes is to discourage drinking, but Europeans drink more than Americans...
It's at least worth noting that a country like Germany can have relatively liberal drinking laws, low alcohol taxes relative to rest of Europe, high alcohol consumption on a world scale, and still be a pretty low crime and low homicide country.
There’s some other differences between the US and Germany. Germany has comprehensive and affordable public transit, so people drink and don’t drive. There’s low prevalence of guns and even knives, so theft and assault don’t carry the risk of murder no matter how drunk the perpetrator is.
When I lived in Germany, I bought beer often. It was cheap, excellent, and you could get it anywhere. However, I don’t think I bought liquor even once. Maybe a shot at a bar here and there, but there’s not much liquor or wine drinking in a lot of these European countries. It’s certainly not sold at grocery stores, gas stations, and bodegas. I think the prevalence of hard alcohol consumption in the US probably compounds our drinking problem along with the necessity of a car and the prevalence of guns.
>>>I think the prevalence of hard alcohol consumption in the US<<<
Do we in fact know it to be the case that the US is characterized by a "prevalence of hard alcohol" consumption? WHO maintains the US is 45th overall in alcohol consumption and 67th in the percentage of alcohol consumed in the form of hard liquor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption_per_capita
Well whether the alcohol drunk is beer, wine or spirits depends on the part of Europe.
Germany is definitely in the "beer belt".
I take your other points though.
In Maryland, only a few counties run monopoly stores and they are owned by the county rather than the states. Elsewhere, except for a few grandfathered megastores, the size of liquor outlets are limited which gives distributors a strong upper hand over the largely mom-and-pop retail system.
The biggest Maryland related law is the lack of beer and wine sales at grocery stores. It is always a reminder that I am in DC or Virginia when I walk into a Trader Joe's and see a Two Buck Chuck aisle.
Also true between European countries (counting Scotland as a separate country from England for this purpose).
There are big tax-rate variations between countries here as well. Luxembourg has notably low rates, which results in a lot of people travelling there from all three surrounding countries to buy alcohol (and tobacco).
France is cheap compared to England (yes, I mean England, not Britain), which resulted in the "booze cruise" where people drive onto a ferry or the Tunnel, go to one of the massive hypermarchés in Calais, fill up their car with booze, and drive home with six months or a year's worth - or else with enough for a large event (lots of weddings were catered this way). Brexit has killed this off; bringing more than 18 litres (two cases) of wine involves paying alcohol duty - the saving is now less than the price of a ticket. The old limit was 90 litres (ten cases) per person and you could bring more if you could produce evidence that you were bringing it for personal use (e.g a wedding booking).
There are other borders that have similar phenomena, but without the water barrier making crossing the border expensive, people tend to go more frequently and buy smaller quantities, so you don't get the massive purchases that Brits went for in France.
Still, there are plenty of big alcohol-specialist shops on one side of most European borders.
Personally, I think the effect is that it makes Wisconsin awesome.
Also in Wisconsin, teenagers accompanied by their parents can be served alcohol in restaurants. They love their alcohol in Wisconsin. Even have a baseball team named after it. Most people say it's legacy of all the German immigrants.
Not teenagers - minors. Although, it is up to the discretion of the establishment.
Legend has it that the existence of the Green Bay Packers is due in large part to Prohibition not being rigorously enforced in parts of the state, so other NFL teams didn't mind visiting Green Bay in the early days of the league.
I moved this year from Washington (hard liquor in grocery stores) to Wyoming (if it’s alcoholic, it’s sold in a liquor store—which are ubiquitous and may include a drive-through). My understanding is that Wyoming has a higher rate of alcohol abuse, but that may be linked to rural loneliness.
As a heavy drinker with disposable income, this wouldn't deter me. It didn't when I lived in Stockholm where prices are nearly double. Let's call that "lived experience" rather than anecdote for more credibility.
It's "your truth."
To some extent the spirits tax premium is working as intended; it's harder to get acute alcohol poisoning from hard seltzer than straight liquor, so the tax on spirits is higher to reflect its higher negative externalities. We'd probably want keep a pattern like that as we raise taxes.
It's harder to get alcohol poisoning from hard seltzer than hard liquor but it's not easier to get alcohol poisoning from hard hard seltzer than a mixture of hard liquor and seltzer water with an equivalent ABV. Ideally I think you would just want to levy a tax on total volume of ethyl alcohol regardless of it's form.
You can dilute vodka down, you can't distill white claw up. The form definitely matters, which means it makes sense to tax liquor at a higher per ethyl-mol rate than beer. How much more is up to the economists. Or to be realistic, industry lobbyists.
Also this is discussion is more important to Americans than the Israel Palestine discussion.
Yes but we don’t care and no won else does. Israel Palestine is all over news in a way that China Weager is not. Or Myanmar Rohinga. As for the USA we do business with Saudi Arabia and China and we give aid Ethiopia as the portion of its economy as Israel. Being moral or just is a requirement to business with the USA
The US decline is worse that you think. I think it has to be deprioritized to what it was pre world war 1 when it was basically 0. The USA is simply not in a position to care. The USA cannot tell China or Israel what to do any more than Canada can. We unfortunately need to decide who our friends are based on what they do for us and how reliable they are, not how good they are. America's position in the world is about where it was in the 1860-1900's. Yea we are an important local power in North America, but for the rest of the world we have no choice but to partner with not nice countries like Tsarist Russia to counter balance the UK. We didn't have to option of telling Tsarist Russia stop the Circassian genocide or we wont have you to counterbalance the UK during the Civil War. All we got for watching that and saying was a few Russian ships visiting out ports, and Alaska. And the USA had to prop up little countries that served US interests that did bad things, the USA had to do bad things its self or be left out of the global system of Imperialism. Fighting for Human rights was something the USA had power to do from 1945 till about 2005. We don't have the power to do that anymore. Matts book 1 billion Americans offers a path that gives the the USA the power to look out for human rights. But, accepting that 10 million immigrants a year will never happen mean accepting the USA wont have the power to fight for anything other than its own survival. Every other time you have multiple world powers no one can fight for human rights. It is depressing I want to drink but oh the taxes.
I agree with your moral argument. But international power is relative. The USA isn’t the biggest economy in the world anymore. Australia is a rich country but if they make waves about human rights China stomps on them. Unless we do the 1 billion Americans or merge with the EU we are just one of many countries. Hence why I need to drink before we raise taxes on it.
Strong nanny state vibes on this one. Part of being a free human being with agency is being able to make bad choices. There are plenty of things that are good for people what we don’t compel or incentivize through taxation/subsidy.
What about the argument that heavy alcohol consumption creates negative externalities and that's the reason it should be discouraged?
Literally every nanny state intervention is justified on the grounds of externalities. At some point you just have to step back.
Isn't every law a "nanny state intervention?" Laws either proscribe what one can do or require one to do something rather than leaving one with unfettered agency. Seems rather than just saying something is "nanny state intervention" as if that should end the debate, each particular state intervention needs to be weighed on its own merits.
These anti-murder laws are really just a nanny-state intervention infringing on my personal freedom if you simply ignore the externalities.
Literally every law is justified on the grounds of externalities. We are not arguing principles here but matters of degrees of intervention.
Agree with this. I clearly am on the side of "let's back off a bit" here. Most issues are of degree, not kind.
Why does it seem like where we are now is the optimal place to be, though? That's what all the stuff about how alcohol use is implicated in crime is about. Crime is extremely expensive, so at the current margin, there are a lot of negative externalities to drinking that should be internalized in the form of a tax.
I think Yglesias says that if we look at our broader drug laws, most of them should be backed off a bit, but a few should be tightened. That's how most people have felt about cannabis and tobacco over the past few years, and it probably extends to hallucinogens and alcohol as well.
Yes. Banning alcohol is probably bad, and we should "step back" before we re-implement prohibition. Commonsense health regulations and Pigouvian taxes improve well-being, though, on net.
Well sure - at some point you have to step back. But I think its reasonable to tax at some level things that have negative externalities more things that don't.
You also have to pick something to tax, whether it's sales, real estate, income, etc. To the extent you're taxing any of those things you're also dis-incentivizing them
"Literally every nanny state intervention is justified on the grounds of externalities."
Not "every", just the reasonable ones that sensible people should support.
Nanny state rules prevent you from making bad choices for yourself. This doesn't stop you from drinking, you just have to pay more. Also, it's meant to protect society from you, not you from yourself.
I'm less interventionist than Matt. Rather than micromanaging businesses and arbitrary rules telling people what they can and can't do, I prefer using price mechanisms in well-defined ways that are not easily game-able. Alcohol tax fits this pattern.
Well how do you feel about aids and guns. Or abortion or other thinks that kill and hurt lots of people.
Plenty of things I think are objectively bad (being overweight, divorce, being mean, driving slowly in the left lane). Doesn't mean I think we need to establish taxes on them.
Again, it's a matter of degree vs kind here, but I think Matty (and many technocratic types) err on the side of too much state intervention. Just my 2c.
One thing I find funny in the US is the perseverance of this puritanical streak in the culture and how it affects things like drinking. This is purely anecdotal, but it always seemed to me that the more prevalent the conservatism is in a society when it comes to alcohol, the higher the percentage of risky drinking behavior is relative to total alcohol consumption.
This is almost the antithesis of what Matt is advocating for (and I agree with him, for the record) but what earthly reason is there to have the legal drinking age set at 21?
As opposed to raising it to 25 or 30? I would be in favor of those.
Assuming you mean vs. 18, it significantly reduces drunk driving deaths among young people. Not to mention reducing binge drinking. I'm taking this study at face value, but it seems pretty logical: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20497803/
How dare you counter my anecdotes with real evidence?
Your bigger point about the culture being different is a good one, to be fair; I was just harping on the risks *within the US*. Europe generally seems to attack the problem of youth drunk driving on the driving side rather than the drinking side, with a higher minimum driving age and just more stringent licensing criteria.
On the drink driving thing, there's basically no country where you need to be more than 18 to drive a car though, and even in most of Europe you can't buy alcohol until you're 18.
Though it's probably a lot more common to get your licence later or to not even get one in parts of Europe than the US.
I think there's a good argument to make the ages at which you can drive and buy alcohol *not the same age", for obvious reasons, whichever direction you go with this.
The tighter licensing rules for driving, combined with the absence of drivers' ed in schools, and the tight restrictions on the use of a learners' permit (in many countries you can only legally drive on a learners' permit with a qualified instructor in a dual-control vehicle) are a much bigger factor than the age rules, I think.
Even if you get the permit on your 18th birthday, it's still likely to be a year or so before you pass your test and have a full licence.
And most Europeans can start drinking before they are 18 - it's legal for parents to buy alcohol and supply it to their children either without an age limit or after five in almost all of Europe. Having a glass of wine or a beer with a meal is pretty common even for pre-teens and certainly for teens.
Admittedly, international comparisons are always tricky because there are so many things to control for. Clearly though, there are mitigating factors in Europe, that lead to generally better public health and safety outcomes. I think it’s fair to assume that culture is one of them, but the impact of regulation is probably higher. Again, this is mostly conjecture.
The point I was originally making is borne out of my experience growing up in an Arab country where the vast majority of the population didn’t drink, but most of my friends who snuck around to drink (Muslim and Christian) seemed to engage in far riskier drinking than most of my friends who had a relaxed attitude towards it (Muslim and Christian).
They always say it's to stop drinking and driving, but it would be far more sensible to raise the driving age to 25 and lower the drinking age to 18, so that there is a guaranteed demand for ways to get back home after drinking without driving, which can then offer the same service to over-25s as well and lower drinking and driving.
Driving meets a meaningful need in most people's lives. Delaying it 9 years because some subset of the population drinks and drives does not seem a more sensible solution to me. You're essentially punishing the 35%+ of the population that doesn't drink for something they don't do.
Driving is an economic, social and environmental disaster; if I could abolish it entirely, I would. No-one should ever need to drive and anyone that does is living in a society that is ableist and anti-human.
I'll make the assumption that you think we should all live in incredibly dense cities with subways for internal traffic and rail for travel between them. There should be nobody who lives in suburbs or rural areas where travel by car is the logical way to travel. Which is a view you can hold of course, but doesn't apply in any way to the current reality nor one that exists in the foreseeable future.
Either that, or don't start living that far from other people until we invent self-driving cars.
I have to confess that the enormous level of discomfort I have at the idea of living in a rural or suburban area may be causing me to have a rather stronger reaction against that weird alternative lifestyle than is perhaps common.
Just delete the word "incredibly". A neighborhood doesn't have to be incredibly dense to have some walkable shops and usable transit - a dozen housing units per acre seems sufficient, which still allows a majority of housing units to be detached.
Because the transportation system on the US is entirely based on cars. Raising the age from 18 to 21 gives kids another 3 years to get better at driving before adding alcohol to the mix. Also, if it’s legal for 18 year olds to buy, the kids who turn 18 while in high school will be buying for their younger friends.
Puritanism isn't that big of a factor.
1. Different populations have different risk levels for alcoholism. There is a lot of evidence to support contention that different ethnicity are at greater risk of being alcoholics. https://www.nature.com/articles/4001811. Both in Ireland and in the diaspora, Irish alcoholism rates really are elevated.
2. JamesC's point about drinking ages apply.
3. Cost of alcohol/ease of access. Greater livability of alcohol increases consumption and alcoholism.
Our drinking age is an international outlier, but I think a lot of fairly libertine countries also have quite high alcohol taxes. The data would be a nightmare to assemble, though.
I'm not sure alcohol consumption is as price elastic as the article infers it is. We have Prohibition as a case study in the extreme. And alcohol purchases conform to the 80/20 rule in that 20% of the customers account for at least 80% of sales (I can't find the exact statistics, but they are startling) which means that compulsive, if not addicted, customers are the core of the industry.
The cost benefit ratio of sin taxes is always complicated. For one, it gives government a financial incentive. Privatizing liquor sales where they are state controlled is always steeped in revenue loss arguments. Also the beneficial health effects of decreasing alcohol consumption would increase government health costs as lives are extended. A grim trade-off but one that has kept tobacco taxes from becoming even more punitive.
Finally, alcohol taxes are based on volume of alcohol not price, which adds to the regressiveness of those taxes since a bottle of Blantons is taxed as much as rotgut whiskey. So it's all more complex than just raising taxes on booze, which is still not a terrible idea.
"We have Prohibition as a case study in the extreme"
Yes, and Prohibition worked. The pervasive myth that it was some kind of epic failure is some serious retconning of history. It took 14 years for Prohibition to be repealed....because it had such broad based popularity. Prohibition cut cirrhosis deaths in the US by 65%. Admission to hospitals for alcoholic psychosis fell by 53%. Arrests for drunk & disorderly conduct fell by 50%. Estimates are that alcohol consumption fell by 30-50% nationwide. After Prohibition was repealed, the cultural change of lower drinking persisted: per-capita consumption was less than half what it had been before Prohibition.
Even today, America is widely known as having a less alcohol-centric culture compared to places like the UK or Germany or Russia. That's a direct consequence of Prohibition's lasting social & cultural changes over 100 years later.
I'm not a Prohibitionist but my eyes were opened when I read about 19th Century drinking. Drinking was off the charts and causing enormous social problems, including domestic violence. The later was why prohibitionism was more common among women.
Alcohol may not be eliminated but making reducing the place of alcohol in the culture is a good thing. At a minimum I'd like to see a push to remove alcohol from offices and government functions such as state dinners.
And from advertising on TV (although I know that's a significantly bigger lift).
Worth noting that Matt specifically advocates changing the alcohol tax to an ad valorem tax instead of by volume.
Everything you say about Pigouvian taxes is true, but I'm not sure that they're worse than the distortions caused by taxing something that you think is actually good. If we tax the stuff we want less of and as a result the revenue goes away, I would take that win. The true worst case, as in Prohibition case, is not that elasticity will be too low but that we'll get a lot of evasion and a black market instead.
This is a famous one, although I think it’s pretty misleading since it’s just a survey of what people drank over the last week. It makes the distribution appear way more skewed than it really is.
Also, anyone know what the comment hyperlink code is?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think-you-drink-a-lot-this-chart-will-tell-you/%3foutputType=amp
74 drinks a week is lot of drinking. It's a full time job to drink ten drinks a day.
That would be instictive response as well, I'd be really curious to see how elastic the demand is among the the high consumption segement - I can't really tell from the CDC table that Matt included.
I think the public health benefits of reduced alcohol consumption are obvious, but then again that's true for gun-control so I am less clear on how you make a viabe political case for this.
I would be curious to see as well how much higher taxes would just cause heavy drinkers to substitute towards cheaper alcohol rather than reduce overall consumption. Especially given the correlation between alcohol consumption and income.
Can you please write an article about something we should tax LESS? The persistent theme here is, "we spent $1MM here, but we should have spent $1B there." Is there a thing you don't want to tax?
>>>Can you please write an article about something we should tax LESS?<<<
America's public sector is small by high income country standards, as are its taxes. In general taxes should be higher in the US than they are.
One of the reasons to be wealthier is that a smaller % can actually equal more money. For example - we're at ~27% of tax revenue to GPD compared to Canada at 32%. However, GPD per capita being at 68.3k vs 51.7k for the US vs Canada means we actually have 18.4k to their 16.6k per person in tax revenue.
This is such a perverse point of view. Services should be better in the US. We should have good healthcare, cheap higher education, and a decent welfare state. If that requires tax money, then sure, tax me!
We don't offer any of those services. So...I don't want to be taxed more. Because I receive nothing in return.
I think you might have the causation backwards, no?
Building houses. Pretty sure Matt doesn't want to tax building houses...or immigration.
There's a tariff on lumber imported from Canada; Matt thinks the US should drop it.
Here's a detailed proposal for Canadian tariff reductions, from Mike Moffatt. He points out that there's a number of tariffs which collect very little revenue, but which impose a significant paperwork burden on small businesses which happen to import one of the affected goods. https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/mowatcentre/making-it-simple/
I would think that Matt would want to eliminate a lot of the tax incentives, in effect increasing taxes, around building houses. Now condos and apartment highrises, different story, but more just zoning.
He has stated his opposition to tariffs, especially those on raw materials that drive up the price of building stuff in the US.
Some states have lots of fees for various public services -- getting your license renewed, getting your vehicle registered, and whatnot. These fees can be surprisingly high!
I 100% support decreasing those, and I bet my fellow tax-and-spend liberals (like MY) agree.
I think we should make a national id that could be used as a DL (and voting) that is free and provided for all citizens. We should increase vehicle registration fees to cover electric cars not paying gas taxes.
I simply don't believe that heavy drinkers can be so easily dissuaded from drinking, and forcing light/moderate drinkers to cut back for some vague minor public health benefits is the definition of nanny state. Heavy drinkers are addicts, and we have tons of info about how addicts behave if you make it more difficult to get their fix! They can homebrew or make bathtub/prison booze, they can drink rubbing alcohol or cologne (met a woman from Iran who told me people did this in her country), and of course they can establish a black market. There's a black market in cigarettes for God's sake!
And the politics of it are awful- big Bloomberg soda tax energy, which I don't recall as being particularly successful or popular. Especially coming from the Dems, who already have a nanny state reputation
There will always be a continuum. Some heavy drinkers on the edge of addiction will scale back, some will never start in the first place. We can also look to studies that show it would hardly be a "vague minor benefit":
"A meta-analysis of 50 publications found that doubling the alcohol excise tax would reduce alcohol-related mortality by an average of 35%, traffic crash deaths by 11%, sexually transmitted disease by 6%, violence by 2%, and crime by 1.4%."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3794433
The biggest effect here is going to be on high-functioning problem drinkers, who generally aren't doing things like drinking rubbing alcohol. I've had a lot of experience with these folks and they're definitely sensitive to the price of alcohol. A binge for a lot of them isn't necessarily a pre-planned thing; it's the impulse buy of a second six-pack that ends up leading to a four-day bender.
Appreciate your concerns but believe there is decent evidence that increasing the per unit price of alcohol in Eastern Europe had a large effect on young people dying of alcohol poisoning and dangerous behavior related to alcohol maybe someone knows the references, and that alcoholics are more sensitive to per unit increases in alcohol costs than u might think, and moderate drinkers not so much, and if that were true would it change your mind? I think it is true but I also think I’m a bit lazy and have no idea how all these commenters cite reference papers and statistics all over their comments like how does one motivate themselves in this way teach me!
Haven't the soda taxes actually been moderately successful, even despite the ease of crossing city limits to buy soda?
https://www.fooddive.com/news/how-effective-are-soda-taxes-in-reducing-consumption-of-sugary-drinks/549041/
They work. "The study used five years of data collected from Berkeley, California, the first U.S. city to tax those drinks, and found a 52% decrease in soda consumption in the first three years since the tax was implemented."
The biggest issue is consumers look for substitutes because they crave sugar. I have a very bad sweet tooth. To make soda taxes more effective they need to be converted into sugar taxes.
That way consumers will reduce sugar consumption which is the real harm
Would you distinguish alcohol taxes from gas taxes or firearm taxes in this regard?
In fairness, heavily addicted smokers seem a *lot* more functional to me than heavily addicted alcoholics.
Moderate drinker here but I think Matt is right about this. Anecdatally, I know a quite a few people who drink to the extent that it interferes with their day-to-day lives, often significantly, and my understanding is that many non-crime social issues are also greatly exacerbated by/widely attributable to alcohol abuse.
My maternal grandfather was a hardcore alcoholic, which stressed the family considerably, especially my mother (the youngest of a large Irish brood), who often had to pick up the pieces since her mother was often disabled with rheumatoid arthritis. I consider myself lucky to be a lightweight and extremely hangover-prone.
Not to mention the selling of alcohol at markets in China is what caused the coronavirus.
"Certain things have seen their prices rise much faster than the rate of overall inflation — that’s normally labor-intensive services like child care and education. Other things, mostly related to computers, have gotten much cheaper. Alcoholic beverages are about average."
So, the alcohol moderates the rise in the total cost of college professors who drink a lot. A classic case of the Baumoholic Cost Disease.
There may be a strong pushback with legitimate consistency arguments from the libertarian left/right/whatever backed by the alcohol lobby if more alcohol taxes/regulations coming at a time of marijuana legalization.
For instance, I live in Pennsylvania where currently beer can only be sold in speciality shops and liquor can only be sold by the state owned stores. Taxes get raised on alcohol adding a new inconvenience to consuming it. At the same time, I may soon be able to buy a pack of spliffs at the grocery store (so long as they’re not menthol). Do we really need this many particularisms when all we’re trying to do is get a buzz on somehow and forget we work for the man?
"...I live in Pennsylvania..."
So does L.C. Bee! Did you ever play The Refusal Game?
https://www.toucaned.com/projects/PLCB.html
But seriously, Pennsylvania's liquor laws are weird. Like if you go to a beer store you can't buy less than a case. (Unless they've changed this.)
Weed appears to be less of a public health issue than alcohol so if everyone bought spliffs instead of 6 packs we might be better off.
I don’t oppose marijuana legalization. At the same time, I do think marijuana can perpetuate negative trends of our culture much like alcohol despite it generally being safer. For instance, if one of my kids had to transgress as a young adult with either marijuana or alcohol, I would have to say “depends on who they are.” If they were a basement dweller addicted to video games, I’d rather not introduce weed into that equation. Would likely only perpetuate the current state.
Would introducing alcohol into that equation help at all either?
Neither alcohol or weed seems likely to solve the problem of video game addiction but alcohol appears to be a lot more dangerous to abuse.
The scenario was “had to transgress with either marijuana or alcohol.” It wasn’t like a “Give this kid some BOOZE! Let’s GO!” Type of deal.
Why would that be the scenario? What do you think would be the result of a video game addicted young adult drinking versus the result if they used week instead?
Alcohol would likely effect their ability to function well in game and score phat lewtz. The more mellow vide of marijuana can be compatible with extended game sessions where thumb twitches are required, especially on longer dragon raids.
It’s the scenario because I generally don’t like the idea of my teenage and young adult children using marijuana or alcohol.
Are you assuming the kid isn't predisposed to alcohol addiction? If they are, then the potential outcome even for the basement dweller is much, much worse. It seems to me that the worst-case scenario for alcohol is so bad that it outweighs almost all other things you'd consider when weighing the two against each other.
Nope didn’t assume that at all! Totally think it’s a great idea to give someone predisposed to alcohol addiction a shitload of booze when they could have smoked a joint and ordered a pizza instead...
cmon man! Hehe. For the purposes of completeness... you have a point.
Although for spliffs specifically we have the health issue of tobacco but in general if we can get people to substitute weed for alcohol that would be good.
A lot of grocery stores in PA sell beer and wine. Establishments that sell food have long been allowed to sell beer "off-premises" i.e., takeout, and I could be wrong but believe I remember hearing that's how grocery stores in PA have managed to get licenses to sell alcohol, under the fiction they're technically restaurants because they sell some prepared food. It's not anything very logical, such as that the PA legislature decided to rationalize the rules for sale of alcohol in the state, that's for sure.
Yeah! I’ve noticed that too. And like it’s a separate part of the grocery store that has its own register lol. Most efficient way is to have one of husband/wife get food while the other gets beer :D