No Drink Tax

Wisconsin’s beer tax, flat for four decades, would be five times higher under a proposed bill.

 
The tax, unchanged since 1969, would be 18 cents per six-pack under the proposal instead of the current 3.6 cents per six-pack. That means a drinker who averaged two beers a day would pay $21.90 per year in beer taxes, up from $4.38 per year.

 

Case for

 

Drunken-driving victim Cindy Harrington knows the life she lost to drivers under the influence — one in which she could have kept working as a skilled nurse and eventually become a doctor, making sizeable earnings and bettering the health of her community. Instead, Harrington now works helping others with their disabilities but also must cope with her own brain injury and the resulting seizures.

 

“I had total amnesia. I didn’t know my parents or family,” Harrington said of the aftermath of her April 1977 collision with a drunken driver’s vehicle.

 

Donna Katen-Bahensky, president and chief executive of UW Hospitals and Clinics, said her hospital alone pays $6 million a year in charity care for patients who were injured while drinking.

 

Case against

 

Opponents of the beer tax, such as the American Beverage Institute, say it would harm the state’s vibrant brewing industry and that it would fall more heavily on lower-income drinkers.

 

“You could not come up with a worse time to propose a tax on the working man’s drink than now,” said Scott Stenger, a lobbyist for the Tavern League of Wisconsin.

 

UW-Madison economist Andy Reschovsky agreed the tax was regressive but said the increase would be relatively small for even a poor drinker.

 

Get involved

 

Tell your lawmaker to tap drinkers or keep the tax flat.