The 2009 Beer Tax: Daid
Well, it's happened once again--the latest version of the beer tax has died of asphyxiation. As a historical matter, this is hardly new: every couple years, someone proposes a new beer tax, and every couple years, it gets shot down. However, I see some signs that things may be changing. You can see evidence of this shift in the obituary Janie Har wrote in today's Oregonian (I'll highlight the interesting bits):
As the Janie Har piece demonstrates, we are not where we started. Cannon has addressed most of my own concerns: the current proposal is much more modest; he treats small local breweries differently; he devotes the money to public safety and drug and alcohol treatment; he's dropped the phony language. Now we're talking very clearly about a tax on breweries and how the revenues will be spent.
This is a bill I could support. I would prefer and exemption on the tax hike for a certain number of barrels sold in Oregon--say 50,000--and then a tax of $8-$10 per barrel on all remaining sales. This would treat all breweries fairly but still give the smaller players a little breathing room. The problem with this proposal is that it creates two classes of breweries, and this seems a little funky. More importantly, by putting the tax at $23/barrel for big breweries, Cannon invites a huge fight: that would make Oregon the 5th-highest in the country. Paul Romain, the famously powerful big-beer lobbiest, would certainly have something to say about that. But I could live with and would support the bill as Cannon describes it.
No doubt we'll be talking about it again in due course...
When this year's debate commenced, Senator Cannon made a few key mistakes with HB 2461: he treated all beer the same way, making no exemption for small local brewers; he started the tax out at a rate far in excess of the current highest state tax in Alaska and twenty times the current rate; he used language in the bill accusing brewers of sins ranging from teen consumption and death to child abuse. In service of the bill, he also used language I found frankly dishonest, characterizing the tax as a per-glass hike.[Rep. Ben] Cannon [D-Portland] had originally proposed raising the privilege tax on beer from $2.60 a 31-gallon barrel to $49.61.
His latest proposal, with Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, would raise the tax to $5 a barrel for smaller craft breweries and $23 for big beer makers that pump out more than 2 million barrels a year. That would raise about $85 million every biennium for public safety and alcohol and drug treatment. (Each barrel contains about 330 12-oz glasses or 248 16-oz. pints.)
As the Janie Har piece demonstrates, we are not where we started. Cannon has addressed most of my own concerns: the current proposal is much more modest; he treats small local breweries differently; he devotes the money to public safety and drug and alcohol treatment; he's dropped the phony language. Now we're talking very clearly about a tax on breweries and how the revenues will be spent.
This is a bill I could support. I would prefer and exemption on the tax hike for a certain number of barrels sold in Oregon--say 50,000--and then a tax of $8-$10 per barrel on all remaining sales. This would treat all breweries fairly but still give the smaller players a little breathing room. The problem with this proposal is that it creates two classes of breweries, and this seems a little funky. More importantly, by putting the tax at $23/barrel for big breweries, Cannon invites a huge fight: that would make Oregon the 5th-highest in the country. Paul Romain, the famously powerful big-beer lobbiest, would certainly have something to say about that. But I could live with and would support the bill as Cannon describes it.
No doubt we'll be talking about it again in due course...