A penny tax on a drink of beer would go far toward changing North Dakota’s reputation for being No. 1 among the states in binge-drinking, according to the North Dakota chapter of Students Against Destructive Decisions.
The group held a press conference today to push for an initiated measure that would raise the state’s wholesale tax on beer by eight cents per gallon, or about a penny per drink.
The $1.3 million a year generated by the tax would go for prevention programs, which the state currently spends next to nothing on, said Lee Erickson, the state coordinator for SADD.
Students Against Destructive Decisions. That sounds...rather Orwellian to me.
I’ve never understood what’s so bad about bad decisions. I mean, we should avoid them when we can, but often the best way to learn is by making bad decisions. It’s also how we make the human race stronger and smarter. If we keep protecting idiots from themselves they aren’t going to evolve, and we’ll be plagued with the same idiot problems from those idiots for longer.
But whatever. I digress.
What this group wants, basically, is funding from the tax payers to pay for their self-righteous, “we’re gonna tell you what to do” busybody group. If this would pass, they’d get a big payday and we’d all get to hear their annoying ads on TV and radio and get their annoying literature shoved in our faces at public events. And the worst thing is that our money will have paid for those ads, etc.
If these folks want to combat binge drinking them the do it with their own money and whatever cash they can raise from the other nanny-statist busybodies.
Of course, the key to stopping binge drinking doesn’t lay with funding the morons at SADD. It lays with making it legal for kids to drink.
Much like the gun control issue, though, the problem with alcohol abuse lies not so much with the availability of alcohol to the public but rather with a small portion of the publics’ inability to handle alcohol responsibly. If you deny citizens access to guns some citizens will still be thieves and murderers. If you deny citizens access to booze some citizens will still be substance abusers. The key is to address root causes of a problem rather than simply treating symptoms of that problem.
So what is the root cause of binge drinking among college kids? I’d say it’s because most college kids are immature, living on their own with a bunch of other people their own age and away from their parents for the first time in their lives and enjoying their first window of legal access to booze. Those three factors combine to create a perfect storm of inebriation and stupid behavior.
So how do we fix it? How about giving these kids access to booze at a younger age? Such a suggestion will likely cause heads to explode among most neo-prohibitionists, but I think it makes sense. Booze in college is a novelty. If you remove its status as a novelty you’ll get less drinking just for the sake of drinking. I say we let kids start drinking booze earlier in their lives, while they’re still living at home and under the control of their parents. Then, once they’re grown up and living away from their parents, alcohol is going to seem like less of a treat.
Plus, the drinking age should be at 18 at least anyway. If 18 - 20 year olds are old enough to vote and/or enlist in the military to die for this country then they’re old enough to have a beer.