It doesn't have to be called "neo-Prohibition" to be a problem

Somebody asked me the other day whether the Trump administration might try to walk back the 21st Amendment—to repeal Repeal, as it were. On one hand: no, this is not a thing. Don from Queens is a famous teetotaler, but he’s shown no interest in turning that personal preference into a national policy. More importantly, it takes the buy-in of both chambers of Congress and a super-majority of the states to change the Constitution.

On the other hand: look around you, man. Laws are only real when they’re enforced, and as the past month has made clear, whether they will be is an open question! The “Make America Healthy Again” regime is intentionally torching the public-health establishment! We’re through the looking glass, and the drinking glass too. So fuck it: let’s run the thought experiment.

Start by following the money. There’s a weirdly close relationship between the federal income tax and the booze business in the US that dates back to before Prohibition. In a fairly literal sense, the implementation of one allowed for the implementation of the other. “The organized drys had supported the income tax back in 1913 in order to breathe life into Prohibition,” wrote Dan Okrent in Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. A decade and a half later, in the thick of the Great Depression, “group of powerful and well-funded wets sought to kill Prohibition so that the income tax might die as well.” Rather than Uncle Sam dipping into their fortunes, they offered up the cumulative bounty of a federal excise tax in lieu of payment.

The robber barons only partially succeeded: while Repeal went through, the US still has a federal income tax, albeit a purposefully hobbled proxy of its New Deal-era predecessor. But my basic point here is that in 1933, with Hooverville breadlines haunting the national memory, and another brewing European conflict darkening its future, United States’ beverage-alcohol industry’s potential tax revenues were crucial to sustaining the American experiment.

Times change, and beverage alcohol’s share of Uncle Sam’s annual receipts have changed with them. In 2023, for example, federal excise taxes on beer, wine, and spirits generated $11.1 billion, according to a September 2024 report from the Congressional Research Service. That’s a decent chunk of change, but it’s just a drop in the bucket that is the contemporary federal coffer:

As you can see, federal excise taxes on drink are dramatically less crucial to funding a government now than they have been since World War II. Sure, the industry writ large generates many other forms of revenue for the federal government—and individual state governments, too; most have their own excise taxes, though it varies a bunch by category—via other taxes and knock-on effects. (E.g., the Beer Institute, the preferred trade group of the country’s macrobrewers, claims the brewing business alone paid $63.3 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.) But in the context of the overall federal take ($5.1 trillion in 2024) and certainly in comparison to the country’s Prohibition-era budget, today’s booze-industry revenues are pretty small beer. Ahem.

I don’t know exactly what this augurs for today’s bev-alc industry, but it strikes me as a not-great indicator, particularly given anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s confirmation last week as the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), and Boer-in-Chief Elon Musk’s anti-constitutional attacks on the Internal Revenue Service, et al. Repeal may have been engineered by “the money interests,” but Prohibition was primarily an ideological battle fought by populist crusaders against capital. Now, as then, the American political economy vis-à-vis alcohol is controlled by a hodgepodge of sometimes-contradictory interests, and the ideologues are in charge.

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