I was tasked with freeing up a bit of space on our Freeview-recorder-box-thingy, and I watched that programme (a fair summary of which is here) one last time before deleting it for good.
The most outrageous claim they made was that 'alcohol consumption costs society £16.2 billion a year', and the most plausible one that people in the UK consume 52 billion units of alcohol a year.
But let's run with that £16.2 billion 'total cost' figure, which divided by 52 billion units = £0.31/unit. Beer duty happens to be 18.57p/unit (from HMRC, a unit = 10 ml alcohol), so - for example - beer duty on a pint (568 ml x 4% ABV) = 2.272 units x £0.1857 = £0.42.
That's just the beer duty though, what's the average price people pay for a pint? 60p for a 440 ml can in the supermarket = £0.77/pint and (say) £3/pint in the pub. The average must be about £1 (that's assuming 9 pints are drunk at home for every 1 in the pub), and out of that £1, 16.67 p is VAT, ergo total tax a on a pint is about £0.59 (£0.42 duty plus £0.17 VAT, stick on another fifth for PAYE on salaries of people working in breweries or alcohol retail, corporation tax etc) = £0.71, divide that by 2.272 = £0.31 tax/unit
£0.31 tax = £0.31 'total cost to society', problem solved.
And I'm pretty sure they didn't factor in the 'benefit to society' of all that boozing, which by definition is roughly equal to the total amount that people spend on booze, i.e. £23 billion*, which means that even by their reckoning, the net benefit to society is a princely £6 billion a year :-)
* 52 billion units ÷ 2.272 units/pint = 23 billion pints, again assuming cost/pint £1 each.
Io! Saturnalia!
4 hours ago
8 comments:
I think you'll find a unit of alcohol is 10ml, not 1, but looks to me as though your figures still work.
FT, ta, I have amended.
Akso generously assuming that their figure isn't completely fabricated.
R, their figure is almost certainly plucked out of the air.
My point was that they have to pluck a bit harder. Elsewhere in that programme, the bansturbulary from Sheffield University made the even more outrageous claim that the 'cost to society' was 90p a pint, which is at least slightly more than total tax paid by drinkers.
Maybe we could bring in a process whereby the tax on each unit consumed goes up the more you consume. The first glass of beer/wine a day does no harm to the person or society (some good even). But once you get up to the sixth drink and beyond, then perhaps violence and (if regular) illness may follow. Totally unworkable in practical terms of course, but if any drinking is a cost to society, it's the holics & bingers creating it so ideally they should be the ones paying the most.
B, of all the unworkable ideas I have ever heard, that must be one of the best. Or there again, we could just make sure that people who go round drunk smashing things up are fined properly.
You forget that benefit is not allowed as a concept when talking of unapproved substances. They have decided there aren't any - we're just hope;ess addicts who make purchases irrationally purely on the basis of advertising stimuli.
How can they possibly come to any other conclusion when their computer models are based on the very same programming? ;)
DP, I can't help myself, I'm an accountant so I always look at both halves of the equation.
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