🥃 SPIRITS
Bourbon-mania is getting worse. It’s time for a “tater tax.” Unfortunately, someone recently sent me an October 2022 Gear Patrol blog about some Ohio schmo-hio who owns $100,000 worth of Blanton’s, a perfectly serviceable midshelf bourbon that has, in last five years, driven the nation’s “bourbon taters” absolutely insane with hoggish lust. It got me thinking about how we as a society might discourage America’s sentient quarter-zip sweaters from this corny and selfish hoarding behavior. I believe I’ve come up with an answer: we tax the shit out of them. Want to buy a bottle of tater bourbon? You can either pay a pornographic markup—300%, 5000%, whatever—or exchange an empty bottle of another tater-magnet for a slightly reduced gouge. If you publicize your collection (like the self-professed “ultimate Blanton’s tater” in Gear Patrol), you’ll also be immediately bumped into a special punitive tax bracket and sent to Buffalo Wild Wing’s for reeducation, because you clearly have too much money. This would surely have all sorts of unintended consequences that I don’t care about, and it might not even deter the taters, who tend to be a fairly crafty bunch. And longtime booze journalist and author Aaron Goldfarb argues, taxing the taters might not even be the right move. Here’s a (condensed, edited) transcript of our text exchange: