200% tax on French champagne? A $2.4 billion dollar bonanza! Why didn’t anybody think of this sooner?

Photo above - Kanye West would like to remind everyone that his go-to drink is "Hennesey VSOP and Coca Cola". He may possibly have received compensation for this product placement at the VMA awards.

America has a LOT of problems. A champagne shortage hasn’t been one of them, until now. Imagine having to pay $540 (plus tax) for your next bottle of Krug Grande Cuvée Brut. (see link below). Up from it’s usual $180 retail price. I might have to scale back the guest list for my evening soirees if this takes effect. The parties where I’m asking friends to visit my Go Fund Me page for a house down payment . . .

Actually, this champagne tax is more likely to be a problem for the finer homes in Bel Air, Brentwood, and Beverly Hills. Well, they weren’t Trump voters anyway, despite benefiting to the tune of billions from his first term tax cuts. Politics makes strange bedfellows, no?

Please tell me that the French champagne tariffs are NOT because we suddenly discovered Paris is secret source of Fentanyl. Or of migrants escaping EU taxes and stagflation, and coming to America. That seems unlikely, but I suppose someone will post a reply showing a guy named Pierre mowing lawns in East Hampton, while sipping a flute of brut. Those brutes!

This new tax could be lucrative. America imports nearly 30 million bottles of bubbly each year. At a (conservative) estimate of $40 retail per bottle, we’re talking $2.4 billion in new tax revenue annually. If we applied this toward homelessness and fentanyl treatment, it would dwarf what’s being raised at Los Angeles cocktail parties.

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” (Mohandas Gandhi).

The US champagne tariffs are of course in retaliation for EU levies on American bourbon, which has edged Single Malt Scotch as their go to drink. Canada is also threatening to bankrupt Jack Daniels. Is it possible this eye for an eye thing could make the whole world sober?

America has tried to deter alcohol consumption in the past. The results were not ideal. The first time was the 1794 “Whiskey Rebellion”. A small levy intended to repay the federal debt for the war of independence. Veterans and farmers objected – violently. 13,000 armed troops eventually became involved, before the tax was abolished.

The second time was prohibition. Some well-intentioned ladies from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union ushered in the era of bootlegging, Thompson submachine guns, and the Saint Valentines’ Day massacre. The Canadians bailed us out of that one, by smuggling caravan loads of their own distilled spirits across the longest undefended border in the world. We should remember and honor their selfless act. The prohibition era smuggling didn’t result in any punitive tariffs like we are imposing today because of Canadian fentanyl.

I’m all for stopping fentanyl. And for sobriety. And paradoxically, for affordable champagne, provided that none of it involves royalties paid to rapper-influencers like Kanye West.

I'm just sayin' . . .

Trump threatens to put 200% tariff on French Champagne and other EU spirits