A Tax Increase Conservatives Should Love

I've been following Joe Nocera's Gun Report (and the Hammer Report) at The New York Times. Regardless of your take on guns, it's often funny in a morbid and depressing way.

One of the common factors among the incidents I noticed was the involvement of alcohol. It seems that an awful lot of shootings, including domestic violence, accidental child shootings, and gang shootings, involve drunken spouses fighting, drunken parents playing with guns and drunken or high gangbangers evening scores.

Turns out that it's not a coincidence. In an interview with Mark Kleiman on the Washington Post's website, some interesting statistics stand out:

Kleiman: Half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did…Of the class of people who go to prison, a lot of them are drunk a lot of the time. So that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have done it if they had not been drunk. It’s just that being drunk and committing burglary are both parts of their lifestyle. Still, alcohol shortens time horizons, and people with shorter time horizons are more criminally active because they’re less scared of the punishment. Most people who drive drunk are sensible enough to know when they’re sober that they shouldn’t be driving drunk. It’s only when they’re drunk that they forget they’re not supposed to drive drunk.

Maybe the NRA should change their motto to "Guns don't kill people, drunks kill people." Oh, wait, that ship has already sailed: the NRA endorses carrying concealed weapons in bars.

Kleiman's recommendation?

Taxation is just about the perfect way to control alcohol use. It’s not complete, because you need controls for the real problem drinkers. But if we tripled the alcohol tax it would reduce homicide by 6 percent. And you’re not putting anybody in jail. But instead we spend our time talking about doing marijuana testing for welfare recipients.

All this murder and mayhem caused by drunks costs American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars every year in workplace productivity losses, law enforcement, prisons, traffic deaths, health care and so on.

In addition to directly reducing the damage to the economy by reducing public drunkenness, tripling the alcohol tax would also raise $17 billion in revenue, helping to recoup law enforcement and health care costs caused by drunks and the beer companies that feed their habits.

Everyone agrees that the people who cause problems should pay for them. So conservatives, especially the most conservative Southern Baptists, Mormons and Methodists, should love an alcohol tax increase.