I'm going to get a keg later this week. We're going up to my brother-in-law's for the weekend, and The Lion Brewery just came out with this fantastic new beer, Stegmaier Brewhouse Bock, so I'm going to pick up a sixtel keg – about 5 gallons – to take along. It's a great price for such a good beer, too: only $39.99 plus tax.

 

Plus tax... Hmmm... How much is the tax? Well, Pennsylvania has a 6 percent sales tax, so that's an additional $2.40, right? At the register, yeah.

 

But if we dig into this a bit more, there are taxes hidden under that "plus tax" price. That price is already plus tax. Sharpen your pencils.

 

First, here in Pennsylvania, there's an excise tax on beer of 8 cents a gallon: 40 cents on my 5-gallon keg. Not much. In fact, it's one of the lowest in the country. If you're in New Hampshire, a state considered consumer-friendly because it has no state income tax, the beer tax is 30 cents per gallon. Now we're up to a $1.50 on that little keg. If you drink as much as your average New Hampshire snowmobiler, you're better off with an income tax and no beer tax. If you're in South Carolina, the anti-alcohol lunatics have imposed a beer-tax rate of 77 cents per gallon! That's $3.85 right into the state coffers for that 5-gallon barrel!

 

But that's chicken feed. The feds imposed a dollar-a-barrel beer excise tax to help pay for the Civil War, and it has only gone up since then (a "barrel" in industry and tax terms is 31 gallons of beer – that big barrel you buy each Sunday for your church social or wedding-day keg stand is often called a "half barrel" because it's 15.5 gallons). We held at $9 a barrel for 40 years, then in 1991, Congress raised taxes on yachts, private airplanes, fur coats, jewelry, luxury cars ... and they doubled the tax on beer to $18 a barrel. An estimated 60,000 people in brewing and related industries lost their jobs. The taxes on luxury items were later all repealed, but not the beer tax.

 

Rich guys win. You and me? Screwed. Stop me if you've heard this before. There is, however, a 60 percent tax reduction for breweries that make under 60,000 barrels a year. But my 5-gallon keg from The Lion? Big brewery. Cha-ching! Three bucks. We're up to $5.80 in taxes now on my $39.99 purchase.

 

Start looking at everything that's taxed in a barrel of beer and you'll go crazy: the malt and hops that make the beer are taxed when they're sold; the fuel in the trucks that haul the beer is taxed; the buildings of the brewery are taxed; almost every cost of the brewery, wholesaler and retailer is taxed. The Beer Institute estimates that of every dollar you spend on beer, 44 percent of it goes to the government. I feel like a total patriot! Or a socialist. Take your pick.

 

Now, that "add up all the taxes" thing is revealing for any product – like bacon, for instance. (I don't know why I think of bacon all the time since I started writing for Cold, Hard Football Facts.com.) But booze gets that excise tax, its own sharp stick in the eye: $18 a barrel, plus whatever your state tacks on in excise and sales taxes. It's outrageous. The government gets that $18 every time a brewery makes a barrel of beer, and the big boys have 500- or 1,000-barrel brewkettles that they run three times a day. The brewing industry pays $9.2 billion in excise taxes every year, just because some bluenoses in legislatures decided that we should pay a "sin tax" – money that's ostensibly there to make it harder for us to do a baaaaad thing: have a beer. That, and they know damn well we'll pay it to get that liquid love in a glass.

 

I'd tell you to write your Congress-critter, but you and I both know it won't do any good. "Oh, Representative Pickpocket, I know you guys stopped making the rich folks pay extra for their yachts, any chance you could reduce my beer tax back to what it was before you doubled it back in 1991?" Don't waste your keystrokes. It would be easier to steal the booze out of his office. To be fair, there is a bill circulating to repeal the tax ... but it's been circulating for years, and no one gives it a serious chance of passing anytime soon.

 

So what do we do? Well, keep buying beer, because it's your God-given right. And watch out for what's coming next: tax increases. The feds are satisfied right now, but the states are always looking for more money, and the anti-alcohol folks, the neo-prohibitionists, are pushing hard for higher taxes as a way to reduce underage drinking. They have some study that for X increase in beer taxes, there is a decrease in underage drinking of Y. They plug in new numbers all the time, but X is always a high number, and Y is always a nebulous one. (How do you measure underage drinking? By arrests? How much goes undetected? By surveying teens? They won't tell their parents what classes they have – you think they'll tell a geek with a clipboard if they're drinking underage?)

 

This unholy alliance of politician and prohibitionist never sleeps. They're back every year, pounding away with an offer that sounds too good to refuse: save the children ... and get more tax revenues while doing it ... from somebody else. Win-win, cha-ching! This is when I fire up www.congress.org and write my state legislators. I always tell them the same thing: I don't mind paying my fair share of taxes to keep the state programs going, but I want everyone else to pay their fair share, too: leave my beer alone.

 

Stand up and be counted. Don't be one of those sniveling warts who join in their own punishment: "Oh, sure, I guess I can pay a nickel a six-pack more. I probably shouldn't drink so much anyway."

 

Pal, you pay enough already for the sin of working at your annoying job. You do NOT have to pay more to have a beer when that 8-hour shift in hell is over. Be a man, defend your beer from the pasty-faced safety Nazis and morality police who want to tax it right out of your hands. The price of beer freedom is eternal vigilance.

 

Now, who's thirsty?