How Would College Students Be Affected By A Deficit-Closing Alcohol Tax?

Mark Kleiman proposes an alcohol tax to help close the deficit:

I haven’t run the numbers carefully, but the back of my envelope tells me that tripling the Federal alcohol tax – still leaving it below Korean War levels in inflation-adjusted terms – would bring in on the order of $15 billion a year in net revenue, after adjusting for the (entirely desirable) reduction in volume.

As Phil Cook points out, moderate taxes on drinking – tripling would put the federal tax at about 30 cents a drink – have almost all of their impact on drinking by heavy drinkers; if you’re having the proverbial “two beers,” tripling the tax adds a negligible 40 cents to your tab. But if you’re soaking heavily, the bill starts to mount.

Teenagers, who on average have less disposable income than adults, would feel the pinch disproportionately; since drinking by teenagers is especially bad for their health, and they’re especially likely to act violently or wreck their cars when drunk, I’d call that a feature, not a bug.

Tripling the alcohol tax would, in addition to the revenue it brought in, reduce violent crime and auto fatalities by something like 5% each: that’s about 800 fewer murders, 10,000 fewer rapes, and 1700 people not killed on the highways. The total impact on health is harder to compute, but heavy drinking kills about 100,000 people a year; if tripling the tax, which would raise the price by about 20%, led to a 10% reduction in volume, that would certainly show up in morbidity and mortality statistics, and in health-care costs.

As a beer-loving twenty-something college student, I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, I really want to close the deficit, and this sounds like one of the more painless proposals to help do it that I’ve heard. On the other hand, in addition to being a beer-loving twenty-something college student I’m also a poor beer-loving twenty-something college student, as are many other people I know, and an alcohol tax definitely won’t stop them from drinking, including drinking to excess. But it might stop them from buying some of the more hazardous alcoholic drinks that cause blackouts and seriously dangerous alcohol consumption, since alcohol is generally priced by content (the higher the alcohol percentage, the more expensive the drink is). How likely are students to buy, say, a Delirium Tremens (already an expensive beer with a high percentage of alcohol) if there’s a heavy tax on it? Not as likely as they are to buy, say, Coors, which is less expensive now and would still be less expensive than drinks with high alcohol content. So, by my estimation, only from a health perspective would an alcohol tax be a good thing. It wouldn’t stop students from drinking, but there’s reason to believe it might discourage them from drinking an excessive amount.

Keep in mind though that that’s from a strictly health-interested point in view. I’m entirely against a tax from a personal perspective. Then again I’ve never had so much to drink that I blacked out (but I have had my share of hangovers), and I don’t have a lot of money to spend on the expensive beers I like.

(Image by jesus_leon used under a Creative Commons license.)