Re: OT - OLDER THAN DIRT QUIZ

[Buddy Matlosz]

I'm still trying to deal with the visual of you in high heels, Charlie.

B.

[Charlie Self]

Buddy Matlosz notes:

Honky tonks. Cowboy boots? At least I didn't often wear roper heels. Those suckers can kill you on a dance floor.

Charlie Self "Brevity is the soul of lingerie." Dorothy Parker

[Silvan]

Yes. No rhyme, no reason, but *nasty*!

So much for the image of women as delicate little flowers.

[Cape Cod Bob]

Charlie, I thought I did, but realize I was overly succinct. Yes, there is a campaign against drunk driving and under-age drinking and package/ad "warnings" . But, when they tax alcohol to the same extent as tobacco, I will believe that there is a serious public support against drunkenness. However, that will not happen as the grain lobbies have a lot of political clout.

On Dateline last night, they had a story about dieting. One of the dieters said he'd most miss his 14 to 16 cans of beer A DAY! Everyone chuckled at his consumption. The guy is an alcoholic and it's not cute, manly or humorous. If he had said he smokes 4 packs of cigarettes a day, there would have been consternation and ridicule.

Cigarette prices range from as low as about $20 to almost $50 a carton across the US totally because of taxes aimed at deterring smoking. The variation on alcohol taxes is almost non-existent.

I just don't understand it.

[Cape Cod Bob]

On Sat, 03 Jan 2004 20:04:21 GMT, [e-mail] (Doug Miller) wrote: HEAVY SNIP

I have tried to find stats but have been unable to. The problem in not finding hard numbers, I suspect, is because of many factors including

1) alcoholism affects so many conditions besides cirrhosis that statistical ties are impossible to substantiate 2) Excess drinking is still considered as damn near "cute" except when it involves driving 3) Public acceptance etc etc.

[Cape Cod Bob]

Charlie, look beyond banning alcohol entirely. How about very heavy taxation so that drinking beyond a socially accepted range becomes too expensive to sustain?

[Charlie Self]

Cape Cod Bob responds:

Aren't we at least trying to do that already? Another one of the reasons alcohol and tobacco will never be banned is the amount of money the 2 substances bring in to various governments. If marijuana brought in a similar amount, it would be on sale at all convenience stores.

Charlie Self "Brevity is the soul of lingerie." Dorothy Parker

[Cape Cod Bob]

Not sure what you mean.

Self-service bars are ubiquitous in high end hotels. In Minneapolis, I even saw a "bar" in the room where you inserted your card key to register the purchase and pulled a lever to get one of four brands of beer, 5 types of hard booze (scotch, blend, gin, bourbon and vodka) and assorted mixers.

Not teens, but MANY times adults with the container badly hidden with a wrapped brown bag.

Sports stadiums, bowling alleys, golf courses, festivals, concerts, come immediately to mind. Then there is the almost universal over-looking of street drinking as long as they container is "shrouded."

Me too.

[Charlie Self]

No. You responded to someone writing about public service announcements. That was NOT me.

I don't think so. Cigaret companies have far more clout than farmers, even the corporate farmers who supply boozemakers. The entire structure of tobacco allotments screams of political pressure, and these small farmers have tremendous clout politically, though no one seems to realize it. Try pushing for reforms in any kind of subsidy that affects small farms. Incredible how fast conservatives can turn into people who solidly believe in entitlements...their entitlements.

I guess. I've seen people who have to be alcoholics, but who live a useful life, never create problems, have decent or even good jobs, raise families and on. I'm not exactly sure where the line is--14 to 16 beers a day should keep the guy right on the 0.08 blood alcohol level, but if he does it right, he'd never go over. About one an hour, assuming a slightly larger than average person. Is that an alcoholic? Probably. Is he doing any harm to anyone other than himself? Probably not. Once you answer that second question, you take it out of "Is it any of my business?" and stick it into interference in someone else's private life.

Why does the variation bother you? I'd be just as happy if they tripled the cigaret tax and stopped the damned public service ads. Same for booze. Triple the tax, especially on beer and wine, and get the PSA crap off the air where those of us who don't drink get stuck watching it many times a day if we watch any idiot box at all. Or if we drive down the road and look at billboards. Or open a newspaper or magazine.

I'm so sick of government propoganda on various subjects, I'd like to see that taxed out of existence.

Charlie Self "Brevity is the soul of lingerie." Dorothy Parker

[Doug Miller]

HELLOOOOOO! Earth to Bob!

Alcohol is *already* taxed more heavily than you can imagine: the overwhelming majority of the retail price of beverage alcohol is taxes.

Compare the cost of a gallon of denatured ethyl alcohol at Home Depot to the cost of the equivalent amount of beverage alcohol (e.g. a gallon of Everclear, two gallons of 100-proof vodka, 2.5 gallons of 80-proof brandy, eight gallons of wine, or six cases of beer).

Even *cheap* wine, at two bucks a fifth, is still *very* expensive alcohol: eighty dollars a gallon. Just in case you need this spelled out for you, a gallon of wine contains only about a pint of alcohol.

[snip]

You fail to understand largely because you don't have the first clue what you're talking about. "Variation [between states] on alcohol taxes is almost non-existent"?

Come back when you have a clue.

-- Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

How come we choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America?

[CW]

More government playing momy and daddy. The tax on a bottle of booze should be no higher than the tax on a bottle of orange juice. It's not up to the government to run people lives.

[CW]

It would but it's illegal. Illegal in the US means free market. either legalize it and make money off it or really do something about it. Neither option has been tried yet.

[David Hall]

The pols might sell these taxes as trying to "deter" smoking, but in reality it is just a currently socially acceptable means of raising money to spend on pet projects and re-election spending. Got a deficit? Raise cig taxes- the only ones who will bitch are smokers and everyone else loves to hate them, clearly fewer votes lost than would occur with an income tax increase.

Dave Hall

[Mark & Juanita]

No, when taxation on any item becomes sufficiently oppressive, enterprising folks will find a way around that tax -- i.e. bootleg cigarettes or alcohol. When the taxation rate reaches sufficient levels, the profit motive / risk margin in bootlegging becomes sufficiently large that the shadier elements of society view it as a reasonable endeavor and the formerly law abiding tolerate those shady elements to get what they want at less confiscatory prices. There is a law of unintended consequences to the ever-persistent "solution" of "just tax it until it's too painful to do". The flip side of this is that to provide sufficient level of enforcement to break the bootlegging business, the civil liberties of the entire society are sacrificed -- look at the various loss of privacy and liberty already resulting from the war on drugs.

[David Hall]

Comon, Charlie. If pot and other "recreational drugs" were legalized, regulated and taxed like booze the amount of tax dollars would be staggering. Just ask all the "importers" and "retailers" willing to risk serious prision time and death to keep our supply lines WIDE open in the US. They do it for the HUGE amounts of money. Very little of that goes to the farmer or the processors. Legalized with production competition, raw material costs, production costs and packaging/marketing costs would be nominal - leaving enourmous amounts for profits and taxes. If you then factor in the reduction in prision costs, policing costs, court costs and add some funds for detox and treatment programs and lord only knows how many votes could be bought. (of course you lose the votes of prision guards, policemen, judges, criminal justice staffers, drug "importers" and "retailers", and others with a vested interest in the "War for...ooops ON Drugs").

As to the other poster whose solution to all social ills seems to be taxes, what "illicit" product or activity that people want has ever been taxed out of existence? Not tobacco, not drugs, not prostitution, not Big Macs. Methinks this is just a way to shift the tax burden of all the social programs you want onto "Other People". These types of taxes are also extremely regressive as upper middle class and wealthy folks spend a far smaller percentage of their income on tobacco & booze than poorer people. Hey sounds like that other panacea for shifting taxes to "Other People" - Gambling.

Dave Hall

[Mark]

At least till the private crop came in.

[Charlie Self]

Mark responds:

Yeah, and I'll bet that is one of the considerations, too. Tobacco needs prcoessing for use, as does alcohol. Pot needs drying, period. Hard to stop private growth if it's legal.

Charlie Self "Brevity is the soul of lingerie." Dorothy Parker

[mrdancer]

Moreover, consider all of the money/spending that occurs around the drug trade presently. Yeah, a good chunk of it prolly goes outside our borders, but a bunch of it stays here (speaking from a USA standpoint). That that goes outside our borders is prolly used to buy weapons from the U.S.

Legalize dope and you'll see fewer Escalades and Uzis in the 'hoods... that part of the economy will tank, along with jobs used to create those Escalades and Uzis, etc. So now we are talking gov't. subsidies to the economy to offset loss of drug money. Will it balance?

[Doug Miller]

Alcohol doesn't need much processing, my friend. I've been making wine at home for years, and it ain't that hard. Making _good_ wine can be a bit tricky at times... :-)

-- Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

How come we choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America?

[Luigi Zanasi]

On 03 Jan 2004 10:00:33 GMT, [e-mail] (Charlie Self) scribbled:

It seems that the further north one goes, the worse the alcohol problems become and the larger the social problem caused by it. Think Scandinavian countries, Russia, Canada, UK, Ireland. I think all these countries have worse alcohol problems than the US.

Canada and the Scandinavian countries are really tough on drunk driving and tax the hell out of alcohol. In Canada, drunk driving has been a criminal offense for a long time, and the penalties are tougher than in most US states. Here in the Yukon, we have a serious Fetal Alcohol Syndrome problem, with kids whose mother drank are born with different levels of mental retardation. We also have the highest per capita alcohol consumption of any jurisdiction in Canada.

Not that any of this is going to stop me from making my 50 gallons of wine a year, which I drink in moderation. Well, maybe except for New Year's Eve.

Luigi Replace "no" with "yk" for real email address