Oregon: Amsterdam Style, Tax the Beer
Oregon is a is great place to live, provided you can get over the unemployment, near terminal tax issues and distrust of government. It is also a state that generates significant revenue off of sin taxes – liquor and cigarettes. Let’s talk a real beer tax.
The legislature failed to create a tax the beer; I don’t know all the details as to why if failed, but there were good reasons why it should have.
Like many tax propositions that get shot down in Oregon, it totally ignored how the industry works, making it overly complicated for the industry and unpopular.
The simple solution to taxing a glass of beer is to tax a glass of beer.
Go ahead and tax each served alcoholic beverage $.25 at the restaurant, inn or tavern – lets not leave out the wine and scotch and waters. Make it simply a restaurant tax on the product, and put it on the serving itself, not an arbitrary amount of fluid ounces – in other words, it taxes the unit as a form of consumption tax.
Yes, that puts on the restaurants to collect, and there is a certain arbitrariness to unit sales. That’s $.25 on a pitcher or beer or on a 12 ounce glass. So what? It is a ticket item that is in line with the process of delivering a single product unit to a customer.
