> You know what's even dumber? Having a product that can vary in price 1000x or more...and taxing it by volume, instead of by its price.
To be fair, this is just an excise tax on production. In most jurisdictions you'll also pay a percentage based sales tax on that as well. If you buy a bottle costing 2x as much, you'll pay 2x as much sales tax. Everywhere I've lived has had a pretty high sales tax on alcohol, in my current state I pay sales tax plus a volume based supplementary tax, the latter can get pretty high at $11.28 per gallon of distilled liquor.
Sales tax on discretionary and luxury products like this tend to be one of the few taxes that's actually somewhat progressive, given that the rich tend to consume a lot more in terms of dollar amount. Although in the case of alcohol, this would also hit addicts pretty hard.
> Even taxing alcohol at different rates just because it's made with specific fruits is idiotic. It smacks of lobbyists buying off their congressional reps to get a rival sub-industry slapped with a higher tax. Just tax alcohol by its value, across the board at the same rate.
Honestly, I think this is more about class than anything else. There is a long, sordid history of societies deciding that one type of alcohol is acceptable and classy, while another is base and to be suppressed. Usually the actual amount consumed doesn't seem to be a factor; nobody ever seems to get too mad at middle class and rich people for day drinking mimosas for example. My favorite cultural representation of this is "Beer Street and Gin Lane", which is both entertaining to me in its absurd hyperbole, and because I'm rather partial to gin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane
Personally, I'm mixed on what I think an ideal alcohol tax would be. It seems to me that we now have the ability to track the actual volume of pure ethanol created and sold, something that recently post-prohibition regulators probably were not capable of doing[0]. On the flip side I do think that there is some social utility in driving up the cost of high proof distilled alcohol via tax; the time before prohibition really shows that cheap distilled spirits tends to make a bit of a mess of things. This could probably be accomplished by a progressive taxation system per gram of ethanol based on the ABV above a certain point.
Thankfully most cider is pretty damned good at 2.5 to 3 volumes of CO2.
0 - The inputs into the fermentation process are a pretty good way to estimate what percentage of alcohol you'll get back out on average, which can be used as a rough means to regulate based on ABV if you lack the technical or governmental capability to test, track, and tax such things. Not all alcohol tax rules seem to use it this way though, such as the difference between cider and sparkling wine based on CO2 volumes, even if it's created by artificially carbonating it.