The Hidden Cost of Your Drinking Habit
It’s Friday, and let’s face it: If you’re not hungover at work this morning, you’re probably wishing you were. My personal favorite hangover cure is data, and the good folks at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just dropped a pile of sobering stats this week that may help clear your head.
They found out that collectively, our national drinking habit costs society $249 billion a year. That cost comes primarily from excessive drinking — bingeing on four or more drinks per evening, or drinking heavily all week long. That total cost manifests itself primarily in things like early mortality due to alcohol ($75 billion of the total), lost productivity and absenteeism at work ($82 billion), health-care costs ($28 billion), crime ($25 billion) and car crashes ($13 billion).
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As I mentioned above, federal and state governments spend roughly $100 billion a year to deal with these costs. This amount greatly exceeds the revenue that alcohol taxes bring in, which works out to something like $16 billion a year — $6 billion from state and local taxes, and $10 billion from federal excise taxes.
This is why a lot of researchers think that state and federal alcohol taxes should be raised. This would have the dual benefit of making heavy drinkers drink less and helping to pay for the costs of their drinking. Federal alcohol taxes are currently at historic lows. But lawmakers, with the support of the spirits industry, want to make them even lower.