Pretty sure we need to realize we have an alcohol problem first. This blows my mind, if it's true.Half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did...
I question this also. Does this mean that the people were breathalyzed and found definitively to have been drinking, or is this anecdotal? I can imagine someone getting arrested and then stating that they had been drinking to deflect some of the blame. Don't forget the rest of what you started to quote: It's disturbing how . . . certain he sounds about this. As if there is a definitive "class of people who go to prison." No, I don't trust this guy at all. He's got Big Brother written all over him. However, the definition of "problem drinker" is something like 5 drinks a day. That's a mighty low number where I come from. Oh right, that's what he's after. Plus, you've got to love this: Pfft. Preference is one thing, being a dickhead is another.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.
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.
So, you can’t do this solely with taxation. You need some regulation with the tax. But tripling the tax would add something like $17 billion a year in new revenue.
Not that I’d be caught dead drinking a blended Scotch.
Haha, I'm sure that was a joke. There's nothing wrong with Johnnie Walker (and shame on the WP for spelling it "Johnny"). I have a bottle of gold at my house, and its spectacular, even as a blend. But to another point, there absolutely is a class of people who go to jail: young black men, especially from low income families. They should look to Canada to see what effect their taxes have had on crime. Their alcohol taxes are through the roof (for example, Labatt Blue, a Canadian imported beer, costs $21/case in MI, and about $40 in Ontario!). This seems like an easy test case to study whether higher taxes curb crime.
Yeah, I don't know. Canada isn't as polite and nice as Americans tend to think it is, but there could be many reasons for lower crime rates. Population size could be a factor, for one. In regard to young black men, given the typical usage of "class" in political contexts is referring to young black men as "the class of people who go to jail" constructive to his advocacy of the issue? If he's talking about the poor in general, why not address issues that tend to lead people to drinking to begin with? It seems easier than taking on alcohol lobbyists.