DRINK BILLS

Waipa Post, Volume 42, Issue 3305, 4 June 1931, Page 2

DRINK BILLS

NOT ENTIRELY RELIABLE. National drink bills are not entirely reliable. At the best they are mere estimates of the expenditure of a people upon alcohol. In countries in which liquor is lawfully sold they are generally framed on behalf of an organisation that is opposed to the use of alcohol as a beverage. There is, in such cases, a probable temptation towards exaggeration in order that the public may be impressed with the enormity of the evil which it countenances. A tendency towards exaggeration may be supposed to exist, also, in the case in which the drink bill for a country that is nominally “ dry ” is prepared on behalf of an organisation that is opposed to the law of the land. For this reason it may be advisable to discount to some extent the figures which the Association against Prohibition has compiled as expressing the drink bill of the United States for the past year. The cabled statement that, according to this authority, the expenditure on liquor in that country amounted last year to nearly £600,000,000 is one that may not inappropriately be described as staggering. The vastness of the figure may perhaps be most clearly comprehended when it is compared with the drink bill of Great Britain for the same period. The estimate of the United Kingdom Alliance is that the British bill for the year amounted to about £277,500,000, or less than one half of the estimate of the expenditure on liquor in the United States. The contrast between the two sets of figures is certainly striking. There iss a point of contrast, moreover, in the details of the expenditure.

Ninety per cent of the United States drink bill is said to have been represented by the expenditure on whisky. The taxation of spirits in Great Britain has placed whisky beyond the reach of the poorer classes, and the consumption of spirits in England declined last year by 6.77 per cent. The influence of high taxation and of depressed times was manifested in a reduction of approximately £11,300,000, or 4 per cent, in the British drink bill for 1930. At the highest point, however, the bill never reached a level that was more than modest beside the giddy heights to which the expenditure in the United States is, despite the Volstead law, said to have mounted.