USA Today reports that we might see increased taxation on alcoholic beverages as a way to pay for health care:

Consumers in the United States may have to hand over nearly $2 more for a case of beer to help provide health insurance for all. [...] Beer taxes would go up by 48 cents a six-pack, wine taxes would rise by 49 cents per bottle, and the tax on hard liquor would increase by 40 cents per fifth. Proceeds from the new taxes would help cover an estimated 50 million uninsured Americans.

The article is extremely unenlightening on the policy merits. Suffice it to say, however, that the real value of taxes on beer, wine, and liquor has declined substantially over the past fifty years. So an increase of this sort would not be an unprecedented burden on the American consumer, it would be more like a return to the level of taxation that existed a few decades ago. As I’ve said previously, I wouldn’t necessarily be enthusiastic about this sort of thing purely as a public health measure. But when you consider that universal health care is highly desirable and has to be paid for somehow, I think this is a pretty attractive way of going about it. The economic efficiency of this sort of tax is high, the public health benefits would be large. What’s more, the incidence would fall overwhelmingly on a relatively small number of problem drinkers (rather than the broad mass of people who drink moderately on social occasions) and the businessmen who profit off them, while the public health benefits from decreased drunk driving and alcohol-related violence would be broadly shared.

In technical terms, it seems to me that this proposal could be improved. For one thing, there’s no reason to tax beer, wine, and liquor all on separate scales. What we ought to do is tax the alcohol content of beverages. For another thing, it would be useful to take this opportunity to peg the tax level to inflation or take some other related step to avoid its real value from eroding over time.

It seems Zvika Krieger was already at work on a profile of Utah Governor Jon Huntsman before he unexpectedly agreed to take the Ambassador to China job. His conclusions about that business—partly politically motivated on Obama’s part, but it works because Huntsman’s so well-qualified, and it works for Huntsman since he doesn’t think a moderate can win unless the GOP gets a thrashing first in 2012—are probably correct, but not all that new and interesting. What is interesting is this theory of why Huntsman started drifting into the reform camp in the first place:

Huntsman seems to have learned another lesson from the Romney campaign: A Mormon, no matter how conservative, cannot win amongst the right wing of the party–particularly evangelicals. Romney thought he could win their favor by becoming a drum-beating social conservative, underestimating the deep-rooted antipathy many evangelicals have toward Mormons. A recent Pew poll found that 39 percent of evangelicals hold negative views of Mormons–a sentiment Mike Huckabee used against Romney. Though RNC Chair Michael Steele was lambasted last week for saying “the base … rejected Mitt because it had issues with Mormonism,” he wasn’t that far off: According to a study by John C. Green and Mark Silk, the size of the evangelical community was one of the best predictors of Romney’s success or failure in each state; without the evangelical vote, they argue, Romney probably would have won in four of the five southern states he lost. In light of Romney’s experience, the more likely base for Huntsman would have been the moderate wing of the party, which is less concerned with religion in general (and the LDS church specifically).

I’m not sure that Huntsman’s really hit on a “solution” to this problem. It seems to me that given evangelicals’ large numbers, the tendency, come what may, will be for an evangelical-friendly candidate to win. Which is to say, a Protestant Christian who favors banning abortion and is hostile to claims of gay and lesbian equality. Of course given the winner-take-all nature of most GOP presidential primaries, it’s always possible for an unlikely Republican candidate to prevail against a divided field. But a Mormon intrinsically has a steep hill to climb.

Probably the only issue on which conservatives have made real headway so far this year is in pushing the preposterous idea that it’s somehow dangerous to hold terrorism suspects on American soil. This doesn’t make a lick of sense—we have many very secure prison facilities—and it has nothing to do with the original reasons offered for holding prisoners at Gitmo. But NIMBYism is a powerful force in politics, and now everyone’s freaking out. Dianne Feinstein hit back today:

Yes, we have maximum security prisons in California eminently capable of holding these people as well, and from which people — trust me — do not escape. So I believe that this has really been an exercise in fear-baiting. I hope it’s not going to be successful.

I wonder if there isn’t a promising potential plan here. You could do something that gave California federal funds in order to house some terrorism detainees in California state prisons. That would help, to some extent, alleviate the state’s budget problems.

Just a brief reminder that you can—and should!—come see me speak tomorrow night at The Next American City’s Washington DC UrbanNexus salon:

Join Next American City and Greater Greater Washington for an URBANEXUS salon discussing blogging and urban policy. Are bloggers the future of organized urban planners? Publisher Diana Lind will moderate a panel of bloggers – Ben Adler of americancity.org, Matthew Yglesias from thinkprogress.org, Sommer Mathis of DCist.com, Reihan Salam from theamericanscene.com and David Alpert of greatergreaterwashington.org – for an interactive conversation exploring the blogosphere’s urban policy activists.

Admission is free for subscribers. Admission for non-subscribers is $15 in advance or $20 at the door for a one-year subscription to Next American City and entry to all NAC events & free food.

I promise awesomeness.