About Lee: Former students' union president and intermitent blogger since the turn of the century, who's aim is to promote objective thinking and a break from partisan politics when discussing the issues of the day. Tories to tax alcopops to help fund binge drinkers
Fri 7th Mar 2008 – (2 Comments)
Yes, it's true! The Tories are ignoring the statistical evidence in front of them and state they will tax dwindling sales of alcopops as well as strong beer and cider, you know the stuff that generally only find in your traditional local pub, and are going to use that barely existent amount of money to try and drop the price on alcohol that kids really drink. Lager.
But the Tories aren't the only dummies, Lib Dems also think taxes on spirits should rise. In both cases they absolutely fail to make a dent on the real drink of choice of young people which is no longer alcopops and probably hasn't been for a good few years, hence why distributors are selling less and less of the stuff each year and moving sales, instead, towards low volume bottled ciders and trendy beers.
It just strikes me as far too ironic that a bunch of people can claim to be so in the know as to want to run the country, yet in trying to cost a "kiddy" friendly drink out of the market actually propose a policy that would make most 13-16 year olds bounce with glee at how much easier it'll make it to afford the bottle of lager with their pocket money.
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Comments
2. Lee Griffin - 7 Mar 2008 - 11:33
Quite, though I don't think they'd have CAMRA on their side ;)
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1. margin4error - 7 Mar 2008 - 11:32
This is all part of a tory strategy to appear informed about policy while ensuring that doing so doesn't hurt their target voter.
They can pretend that this is a simple case of supply and demand (price goes up - demand goes down) and people don't know better so just believe it.
Sadly of course demand is inelastic for addicts who would instead buy less food to save money for the same amount of more expensive alcohol (thats the classic example).
And while demand is very elastic for young drinkers - that reflects the ready availability of substitute goods such as cocaine, heroin, xtc and dope.
So hurray for tories playing to an ignorant audience.