Editorial Advisory Board: Tax liquor, not gasoline

Listen to this article

Some in the General Assembly are attempting to pass a bill that would increase the tax on a gallon of gasoline by 10 cents. Although this comes at a time when Marylanders are finding the price of gas a hard pill to swallow, many claim that a tax is necessary to pay for the fix of the state’s aging road system. The bill also would increase the registration fee for a car by 50 percent.

These funds allegedly would be used for the nearly bankrupt transportation fund. We say “allegedly” because money once in the fund was recently taken by the state to balance its budget, leaving the fund mostly empty.

Gasoline for many Marylanders is a must-have purchase, and an increase in cost will surely affect other areas of a family’s budget, like food, education, insurance and medical care. Alcohol, however, is not a necessity and we find it inexplicable that the alcohol industry’s lobbyists have such a stronghold over our elected officials that they have blocked any increase in liquor taxes since the 1950s (when Eisenhower was president) and on beer and wine since 1972 (when Nixon was President).

That’s correct: the last time the legislature saw fit to raise alcohol taxes was almost 40 years ago.

Maryland‘s alcohol taxes, which are among the lowest in the nation, should be raised on beer, wine and liquor instead of increasing the gasoline tax. The increased revenue then could be placed in the transportation fund and used solely for transportation-related purposes.

The current bill to increase alcohol taxes includes increases of 568 percent for liquor, 640 percent for wine and 1188 percent for beer, based on volume rather than value of the product. The purchaser of a $5.00 bottle of generic table wine pays the same amount of tax as the purchaser of a several-hundred-dollar first-growth Bordeaux.

Given the magnitude of the increase, we question, frankly, whether this bill was even intended by its sponsors to succeed. We do not support the amount of the increase in the bill. But, our elected officials should stand up to the liquor lobby and consider a reasonable increase in alcohol taxes instead of imposing a gasoline tax increase on the persons who sent them to Annapolis.

Editorial Advisory Board members John S. Bainbridge Jr., Arthur Fergenson and Laurel Albin did not participate in this opinion.