Maryland collects a measly $15 million a year in excise taxes on distilled spirits. Whiskey drinker Thomas Meighan Jr. might have costthe state that much all by himself in court, police and jail costs and general mayhem.
Meighan had at least nine drunken-driving convictions as well as convictions for battery, disorderly conduct and theft before being charged with traffic offenses and manslaughter in the hit-and-run death of a Johns Hopkins University student last fall, The Baltimore Sun reported. He has pleaded not guilty to the latest charges, which contain no drinking offenses.
The man who once told a judge, "Alcohol has all but destroyed my life," paid one of the smallest liquor taxes in the country every time he got drunk.
Alcohol taxes are user fees - a cover charge, if you will - to repay society for the grief and havoc from drinking. Marylanders have gotten their seat at the bar too cheaply.
The General Assembly hasn't raised the beer and wine tax since the Nixon administration and hasn't raised the spirits tax since the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series, in 1955. A proud, tax-increasing overachiever in so many other categories, Maryland gets out-taxed on alcohol by the likes of West Virginia, Delaware and almost everybody else.
This state's distilled-spirits tax of $1.50 a gallon is the third-lowest in the nation, after Vermont's and Wyoming's, according to the Tax Foundation. Some states collect more than $20 a gallon.
Our beer tax is one-twelfth of what places such as Georgia and Alabama charge. The wine tax is seventh-lowest in the country.
The booze industry's power to freeze its taxes for decades, accomplishing what the Maryland Chamber of Commerce, the Maryland Retailers Association and every other business lobby has failed to do, gives a sense of its might. Sin taxes are the first resort of revenue-seeking pols, but here is Maryland charging an invisible 0.8 cents in alcohol excise tax per can of Miller Lite.
Most tax collections rise with inflation even if rates stay the same because you pay a percentage on the dollar. But the liquor industry has accomplished a miracle of time travel, paying 2010 taxes with dollars from 1955 and 1972.
The price of a bottle of wine has nearly quintupled since 1972, but Maryland's wine tax is the same 40 cents per gallon as it was back then. If gasoline prices had kept up with inflation at the same pace as Maryland whiskey and vodka taxes, we'd be paying 29 cents a gallon at the pump.
Maryland is finally moving to fix this. Increasing taxes to a dime a drink would generate an extra $214 million for a needy state treasury and discourage teens from imbibing, calculate two professors at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Montgomery County Democrats Del. William A. Bronrott and Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. say they'll introduce bills to raise alcohol taxes in this legislative session. The proceeds would pay for health services and preventing substance abuse.
Opponents say higher booze taxes would hurt restaurants, bars and package stores. That's a slightly better argument than one from the 1950s. "Liquor Tax Seen Making Poor Folk Drink Moonshine," said the headline from The Sun.
"I think a 500 percent increase in taxes is generally a bad idea," says Joseph A. Schwartz III, a lobbyist for the Maryland State Licensed Beverage Association, calculating the impact of Bronrott's proposal. That's a striking number. But because 500 percent is what it would take to get Maryland alcohol taxes back to normal, it's really a measure of how far the state is stuck in the Dark Ages.
Conventional wisdom says nobody will raise taxes in an election year. Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. and House Speaker Michael E. Busch oppose a booze-tax hike, according to news reports.
The liquor lobby's glass, however, is looking kind of half-empty. It might take a year or two, but the General Assembly will finally increase alcohol taxes. Too much time has passed.
Legislators had to take several shots at it in the 1950s. "Is the bill any different this year?" Gov. Theodore McKeldin asked incredulously after they sent him an identical copy of a liquor-tax bill he had rejected. But they overrode his veto in early 1954. See how it's done, General Assembly?
This is the worst recession since before the 1950s. The state revenue crater is deeper than in decades. Because recessions amplify alcoholism, spouse abuse, theft, accidents and other drinking pathologies, the need for succor and treatment is greater.
The way to pay for them is to tax the industry that makes them necessary. That's hardly happening now.