Fight the California Beer Tax

I drink beer.

It's one of the seven natural male pleasures. The others are uninhibited scratching, the canine ability to possess no thought, a total lack of concern for appearance, sleeping late, and eating without manners. Actually they may number more than that, but beer drinking tops the list, especially in Pattaya where the beer is old and cheap.

Not so for California if a state assemblyman succeeds in passing a punitive beer tax raising the pricing of mediocre US beer by $1.80 a six-pack or 10 baht a can. A tax increase of 2000% over the present 2 cents a can. The first-term lawmaker says this tax would generate $2 billion/year into the state coffers to waste on highway construction and the Taliban punishment of drunken drivers. "People who drink should pay for the cost to society like tobacco."

The legislator is promoting his own political demise by this tax, since no one remembers that the USSR fell not because of Ronald Reagan's committing Pershing Missiles to Europe, but Gorbachev's restricting the sale of liquor in Russia, thereby shrinking the tax base in a time of need.

Thailand is on the same path as the USA with talk of banning alcohol throughout the next ear's Songkran festival if the 2008 road fatalities increase 2007 and it certainly looks that way now.

Beer more paeng.

Now those are words for revolution or brewing your own.