Alcohol Industry Quotes
Lobbyists from industries that believe that research in an area might produce findings and results that are inimical to their business or ideology, often lobby to prohibit the research outright or reduce or eliminate the funding for that research.
The charge was made that the wealthy, who paid the larger proportion of an income tax, could get the poor and the middle class to pay the taxes via a Federal Alcohol Tax which would be paid proportional to the alcohol consumed—not even the cost of the alcohol. A quart of cheap whiskey was taxed at the exact same amount as a quart of fine, aged, double malt liquor—about the most regressive tax that has been and still is in force in America. If Prohibition were still in force, the Federal Government would have to raise the income tax to make up for the loss of an alcohol tax. It is debated to this day, how much of a factor this played in the repeal of prohibition.
To this day efforts to regulate alcohol, the nation’s most frequent drug of choice and cause of addiction and violence, are met with the same “virtues” of employment and tax revenue. It was not until the 1990s that we learned that the revenue from alcohol taxes was far less than the cost of society coping with the problems of drinking and addiction.
Father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. Father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher
