Fight the California Beer Tax

I drink beer.

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It’s one of the seven natural male pleasures. The others are uninhibited scratching, the canine ability to possess no thought, a total lack of concern for appearance, sleeping late, and eating without manners. Actually they may number more than that, but beer drinking tops the list, especially in Pattaya where the beer is old and cheap.

Not so for California if a state assemblyman succeeds in passing a punitive beer tax raising the pricing of mediocre US beer by $1.80 a six-pack or 10 baht a can. A tax increase of 2000% over the present 2 cents a can. The first-term lawmaker says this tax would generate $2 billion/year into the state coffers to waste on highway construction and the Taliban punishment of drunken drivers. “People who drink should pay for the cost to society like tobacco.”
The legislator is promoting his own political demise by this tax, since no one remembers that the USSR fell not because of Ronald Reagan’s committing Pershing Missiles to Europe, but Gorbachev’s restricting the sale of liquor in Russia, thereby shrinking the tax base in a time of need.

Thailand is on the same path as the USA with talk of banning alcohol throughout the next year’s Songkran festival if the 2008 road fatalities increase 2007 and it certainly looks that way now.

Beer more paeng.

Now those are words for revolution or brewing your own.

https://www.mangozeen.com/first-beer-of-the-day-232pm.htm


place. "He's very dedicated in areas of health," Fox said. "But a tax of that nature is far too grievous. The beer industry produces so much for the economy. He won't get to first base with that."Dan Gordon, co-founder of Gordon Biersch Brewing Co., calculated that the tax on a barrel of beer would go from $6.40 to $89. "We would all be looking for jobs," he said.

Beall said he's targeting beer because his research showed that California undertaxes brew relative to other states, which he said isn't the case with wine and spirits. But it's also true that taking on the beer lobby will be hard enough for Beall, without letting it team up with the wine and spirits industries.

Beall, a former Santa Clara County supervisor, has focused heavily on underage drinking during his time in Sacramento. He is pushing legislation that would require the sweet alcoholic malt beverages known as "alco-pops" to include warning labels clearly stating that they contain alcohol.

And last year, Beall lobbied successfully to persuade the state Franchise Tax Board to tax "alco-pops" at the rate assessed to hard liquor products instead of beer - a move that was expected to raise the price of a six pack by about $2. The increase is scheduled to go into effect later this year.

That effort, however, did not require a two-thirds vote in the Legislature

This entry was written by Peter, posted on April 15, 2008 at 7:34 am, filed under Driving. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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