People love to complain about “sin taxes” on unhealthy or socially undesirable foods and beverages (for instance, this Booster Shots item on a proposal to tax fattening foods to pay for obesity-related healthcare costs has prompted 831 comments so far). We know many of you think the government has better things to do than police what you put into your mouth. But have you ever stopped to consider how these taxes can help us?
Take the case of excise taxes on alcohol. Raising their price might make it financially difficult for you to host a kegger every weekend, but it also might save your life, says a recent study published online by the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Going out for chocolate martinis may be fun, but “excessive alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of death” in the United States, according to the study. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism says the tab for the ill effects of excessive drinking topped $185 billion in 2006.
In Florida, excise taxes for alcohol haven’t been changed since 1983. Back then, a charge of 48 cents per gallon of beer was meaningful; now it’s the spare change you could find at the bottom of your purse. By the same token, the $2.25 excise tax per gallon of wine and $6.50 per gallon of distilled spirits don’t pack the same financial punch that they did 27 years ago.
Adjusting those taxes to account for the inflation that has taken place since Ronald Reagan’s first term in the White House would not only make alcohol more expensive; it would also prevent between 600 and 800 deaths per year, according to the July 23 study by researchers from the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville.
That calculation is based on data compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The database includes information on every reported death in the country, including its cause. The researchers were able to find the number of alcohol-related deaths in Florida for each month between 1969 and 2005. (These were defined as deaths from diseases in which alcohol was at least 35% to blame, including cirrhosis, alcoholic liver disease, and acute alcohol poisoning.) Then they compared those figures to the financial burden imposed by the alcohol excise taxes, which changed each month due to legislation or the effects of inflation.
Source: Los Angeles Times (USA), 11/08/10
