Glenn Reynolds points to a story by Doug Winship about Washington State’s liquor stores running out of, um, liquor just in time for the July 4th weekend during which all good Americans celebrate their country’s independence by getting hammered. Naturally, all liquor stores in Washington State are run by the government of the state of Washington who 1) screwed up royally and 2) don’t really care because, after all, they don’t have a lot of competition.

While I’ve seldom had difficulty getting the beverages needed to restock our bar at Virginia’s ABC stores, having a state-run monopoly does have its quirks.  For example, I went in the other day to procure some Angostura bitters.  You know the brand that’s synonymous with bitters and that’s a key ingredient in many classic cocktails.  It seems that, for reasons unknown to the manager of my local ABC store, the Commonwealth has decided not to stock Angostura bitters but rather Peychaud’s.  Both are esteemed brands that have been around nearly two hundred years but Peychaud’s is much less, er, bitter than Angostura.  True connoisseurs of such things, of which I am decidedly not one, tend to keep a supply of both on hand as the properties of each go better with different cocktails.

Certainly, if this were the worst thing the Commonwealth’s government were doing, I’d be quite pleased.  But there’s no obvious reason why private individuals shouldn’t be able to open liquor stores and supply a wider variety of products.

USA Today reports on a proposal circulating in the Senate Finance Committee to fund health care through sin taxes on booze.

Beer taxes would go up by 48 cents a six-pack, wine taxes would rise by 49 cents per bottle, and the tax on hard liquor would increase by 40 cents per fifth. Proceeds from the new taxes would help cover an estimated 50 million uninsured Americans.

Matt Yglesias finds this proposal “pretty attractive,” even while acknowledging that the direct public health benefits from reduced alcohol consumption would be minimal.   He notes that this would be a “return to the level of taxation that existed a few decades ago” so it “would not be an unprecedented burden on the American consumer.”

That’s probably right, although it strikes me as highly regressive.  A flat rate based on the category of beverage is especially bizarre.  Why should someone buying a bottle of “Two Buck Chuck” pay the same tax as someone buying a $50 bottle of pinot noir?  Matt suggests that we should instead charge based on alcohol content, which would make sense if the aim was mostly to deter excessive drinking.  But, since we’re trying to fund a health care system, it would make more sense to tax based on price.

Matt asserts “universal health care is highly desirable and has to be paid for somehow.”  I agree with the former, if by “universal health care” we mean that all Americans can afford to get treatment when they’re sick or injured, and the latter necessarily follows.   It’s not at all clear, though, why the “somehow” ought to apply to those of us who use a legal, harmless-if-used-responsibly product.

Matt counters that “the incidence would fall overwhelmingly on a relatively small number of problem drinkers (rather than the broad mass of people who drink moderately on social occasions)” but that’s simply not true.  Sure, a “problem drinker” is likely to consume more booze than a “social drinker.”  But the latter vastly overwhelm the former in number and all of us would pay the tax.

[UPDATE:  In a subsequent post, Matt points to Igor Volsky's recitation of junk science haven Center for Science in the Public Interest data showing that moderate drinkers would pay almost no taxes -- and 35 percent would pay nothing at all! -- whilst the top 5% would pay $215 a year.   I have no data to offer in rebuttal but personal observation makes me exceedingly skeptical of the distribution.]

Given that we’re likely going to have some sort of taxpayer-funded health program passed during Obama’s run, why not simply impose a consumption tax, perhaps excluding food and medicine, instead? It would be less regressive and wouldn’t single out a single activity for punitive treatment.

Photo by Flickr user zsenya under Creative Commons license.

The attempt by California to tax sweet malt liquors as spirits in order to extract higher tax revenues under the guise of protecting minors from themselves isn’t working out so well.

Substance-abuse foes cheered last year when state officials cracked down on sweet, sometimes fizzy, intoxicating drinks such as Mike’s Hard Lemonade that — save for their alcohol content — bear a remarkable resemblance to soda pop.

The sugary beverages had long been taxed as flavored beers. But state authorities reclassified them as liquor, raising the levies on a six-pack by a factor of 16 to match the rate consumers pay on vodka, rum and other distilled spirits. The move was supposed to generate $38 million in annual revenue for the state.

Now the numbers are in: The state has collected about $9,000 since the new tax rate kicked in Oct. 1. Some officials and activists suspect fraud.

Beverage makers admit they aren’t paying the new taxes. They say they don’t have to because they have reformulated the drinks — more than 6,000 varieties — to transform them into simple beers by limiting the amount of distilled spirits they contain.   They won’t explain how. The formulas, they say, are trade secrets. And beverage-industry officials and federal regulators say there are no tests to determine how much distilled spirits the drinks contain.

Kevin Drum is amused by this, as am I.   He’s mostly tickled by the “brazenness” of the companies while my joy is derived from making the lawmakers look silly.  Such is the nature of bipartisan consensus.

As an aside, I always presumed Zima and Mike’s were aimed at chicks, not kids.

Photo by Flickr user faeryboots, used under Creative Commons license.

This billboard sign was mocking the $300 Divorce signs that have littered Toronto the past year or two

The 9th Circuit has upheld Los Angeles bans on billboards, saying no 1st Amendment issues were at stake.

Outdoor advertising company Metro Lights LLC had argued that the city could not prohibit new “off-site” signs — images that advertise products not sold on the immediate property — while at the same time selling advertising space on city-owned bus benches and kiosks. Metro Lights had accused the city of auctioning off “1st Amendment rights to the highest bidder.”

“This is strong, if rather sloganeering, language, but after reviewing the case law on which Metro Lights relies, we believe it to be little more than a canard,” the court wrote.

Howard Bashman has a good write-up on the case.

While my instincts are generally libertarian and to be dubious of anything coming out of the 9th Circuit, this strikes me as a no-brainer.  Decades of case law make clear that localities can impose time, place, and manner restrictions on speech in order to achieve public policy goals incidental to said speech.  Clearly, the city’s purpose here was a reasonable limitation in order to improve the aesthetic quality of the community rather than a backdoor attempt to regulate speech.

Metro Lights LLC is no doubt harmed by the law, since they’re in the outdoor advertising business.  But the harm isn’t to their free speech rights but rather to their commercial interests.  And they’re no more harmed than, say, newspapers and magazines denied the right to publish advertisements from tobacco and liquor companies.

That the city is selling outdoor advertising while prohibiting others from doing likewise is perhaps unfair but it’s hardly unusual.  For example, many states restrict the sale of alcoholic beverages to state-run ABC stores and many also have state-run lotteries while prohibiting private ones.  In any case, it’s not a free speech issue.

Photo by Flickr user Word Freak under Creative Commons license.