A perennial fight over booze taxation

Plus more free school lunch and an update on sentencing reform

If you enjoy a stiff drink, you may be aware that your martini or manhattan¹ comes with an even stiffer tax bite in Washington State. 

Cocktail-swilling Washingtonians pay much more in alcohol taxes² per drink than folks who stick to beer, wine, and beer-adjacent beverages such as hard seltzers.³ 

This disparity gets really lopsided when you get to canned cocktails, a growing part of the adult beverage market. A six-pack of canned vodka tonics will set you back as much as $30, compared to about $12 for beer or hard seltzer because the law treats that vodka tonic as if it were all vodka. 

The hard-booze people have been trying to get the Legislature to reduce that particular tilt of this playing field for years. Each year, they run afoul of an ad-hoc coalition of the beer people, the wine people, and the substance-abuse prevention people.

In general, cocktails out of a can aren’t this glamorous. (Image by Shutterstock.)

Here’s why you should care about this: It’s an example of one powerful and deep-pocketed lobby coming after deeply entrenched competitors who have grown themselves a prickly political briar patch for protection.