Ok, I know I don’t blog very often these days, but when blogger flips my blog into chinese for no apparent reason I have to ask:

How much did I have to drink last night?

Speaking of which, I apparently now run the Jim Beam events up at QUT. How the fuck did that happen? Either way, it made for an interesting situation in class today.

BSB114: Gratuitous Bull Shit (Gov, Biz and Society), a name known by many and hated by most. So I turn up to my tute, swamped by teen girls with “I’m a big girl now’ outfits and faux sophistication writ all over their smarmy and horribly misguided faces, whereupon I was served with an article from The Australian claiming that the alcopop tax has failed and that not only has government revenue gone through the roof as a result (shock oh fucking horror), but that the sales of spirits has gone through the roof and people are getting EVEN MORE drunk!

Ok, I get it, I’ve done economics enough to know that a higher tax should theoretically reduce demand, and that it looks as though someone stuffed up the elasticity calculation and the tax had less of an effect than was hoped. So now the major papers and the alarmists are getting on the “Fuck you’re an idiot Kevin Rudd” bandwagon (as specific as that wagon may be) and calling bullshit on the tax.

While I agree that the tax was horribly misplaced seeing as most research indicates that the demographic OFFICIALLY targeted by the tax actually spends vastly more on imported beers and tends to binge themselves thusly, it has had one effect I agree with.

It has to do with a demographic for which price elasticity for pretty much everything is massive, a demographic for which there are just logically going to be more health risks with the overuse of alcopops.

Kids for fucks sake.

Has everyone forgotten that 13 year olds spend more time planning the underage drinking party next friday night than they do planning what they’re going to do with their lives? These kids have little to no income, just want to get pissed, and will settle for practically anything that will do that for them.

Now all the chickenshit girlies that can’t handle a real alcohol taste will have to do one of three things.

- Stop offering themselves up as potential rape victims by getting all sloppy on cruisers (good option), or
- Drink beer (much harder to get maggot on unless you’re old enough to stomach that much liquid)
- Buy a bottle of spirits and mix it themselves (doesn’t solve anything and is probably worse).

One good option, two bad options. Still better than having the added bad option of getting shitfaced on cordial with more alcohol content than Boriz Yeltzens career. Think about it, those alcopops taste like candy, are packed with more vitamins and stimulants than is healthy for anyone that isn’t living on dried noodles and are more alcoholic than 90% of premium beers.

Don’t tell me this tax is inneffective because anything that helps stop kids that young getting THAT much grog into them is a good thing.

Now for the real solution, and its the solution to most of the world’s problems…

STOP BEING SUCH SHITTY PARENTS!

Kids idolise heavy drinking because you lot of the parenting brigade hate your insignificant fucking lives so much that you have no recourse but to the bottle. Good idea and great example to set (you bloody cretins). It’s not the type of booze that’s to blame, it’s the manner in which it is imbibed and innapropriate drinking habits are caused by:

- BOREDOM << for god’s sake it’s existential now it will be genetic a generation from now
- Stress
- lack of direction
- venting

Now, the problem didn’t exist a generation or two ago, so why now? It’s because the current generation of parents were too busy smoking weed and liberating themselves that they never realised THEIR parents knew better than them. Ergo the current generation of parents gave their own kids to much god damned credit and let them off the leash too soon, resulting in confusion, premature exposure to the realities of life and a sense of wtf now? amongst a lot of kids. This causes STRESS, which then needs to be VENTED or RELEASED? How do their parents deal with it? Booze! What do they then do? Booze! And then the parents go and BUY IT FOR THEM!

Long story short, after you’ve finished taxing alcopops, tax stupid parents, jail them for buying their kids booze, and fine them for not smacking the shit out of wayward kids that do the dirty and sneak booze behind their backs.

Ergo, penis
Kieran

–Lyrics–

A teenage vow in a parking lot,
till tonight do us part
I sing the blues and you swallow them too
– Hum hallelujah (Fallout boy)