Utah’s LDS culture teaches, as set forth by its prophets, that not only should we decline to participate in drinking, smoking and other identified vices, we should not pursue businesses or careers that create or promote them.
Yet Utah’s LDS lawmakers and leaders have thus far determined that in Utah, what is verboten individually is okay as a community and that as a community we should profit from the sale of alcohol through taxes.
One Utah lawmaker has presented a bill that seeks to change that. Rep. Jack Draxler, R, wants to require municipalities to use at least 10% of all beer taxes to blunt the deleterious consequences of alcohol use.
This should make sense to the LDS culture. Why is it wrong to make a living from alcohol use yet okay to fund our schools with the same? To be consistent, it should not.
And what is the rationale for taxing alcohol more than other products? Utahans argue that it is because of its ugly consequences. If this is the rationale, then that extra tax revenue should be used only for this purpose--to ameliorate alcohol uses unintended but foreseeable damaging consequences. To do otherwise makes Utah lawmakers no different than the those individuals who pursue careers in alcohol production and sales thereof. Isn't this what these same LDS lawmakers preach against from the pulpit on Sunday?
http://www.deseretnews.com/utah/legislature
Loren M. Lambert © February 7, 2014
Yet Utah’s LDS lawmakers and leaders have thus far determined that in Utah, what is verboten individually is okay as a community and that as a community we should profit from the sale of alcohol through taxes.
One Utah lawmaker has presented a bill that seeks to change that. Rep. Jack Draxler, R, wants to require municipalities to use at least 10% of all beer taxes to blunt the deleterious consequences of alcohol use.
This should make sense to the LDS culture. Why is it wrong to make a living from alcohol use yet okay to fund our schools with the same? To be consistent, it should not.
And what is the rationale for taxing alcohol more than other products? Utahans argue that it is because of its ugly consequences. If this is the rationale, then that extra tax revenue should be used only for this purpose--to ameliorate alcohol uses unintended but foreseeable damaging consequences. To do otherwise makes Utah lawmakers no different than the those individuals who pursue careers in alcohol production and sales thereof. Isn't this what these same LDS lawmakers preach against from the pulpit on Sunday?
http://www.deseretnews.com/utah/legislature
Loren M. Lambert © February 7, 2014
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