The Institute for Alcohol Studies wants to tell us that while an increase in booze taxation would indeed be regressive it wouldn’t be really. For, if the money raised were spent on the National Health Service then it would be the poor who gain more from the extra spending, even as they pay more because of the extra taxation. This is casuistry and we’ll not allow it:

Raising alcohol taxes does not disproportionately affect poorer households, once the effects of the potential additional funds generated to plough into the NHS are taken into account, according to a study.

Although the research acknowledged increasing duties on alcoholic beverages may hit the most economically deprived proportionately harder than the rich, it claims this is outweighed by how the poorest benefit more from increased healthcare spending.

The report by the Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS), has prompted calls for the Treasury to increase alcohol duties – known as one of the so-called “sin taxes” alongside sugary drinks and tobacco – in next month’s budget to combat binge drinking. The research challenges long-held concerns that alcohol taxes are regressive.

The research - a far too grand name for this perversion of the language - is here.

Regressive taxation is when the poor pay a greater portion of their income in this tax than richer people do. Raising booze taxation meets this standard of what regressive means. Thus higher alcohol taxes are regressive and that’s that, no twists and turns change it.

Higher NHS spending - assuming that it’s not just on the diseases of the rich - will be progressive, we can agree upon that. So, it is indeed possible to say that taxing the poor more - a regressive move - and spending more, in a more progressive manner than the regression of the receipt of income, is overall progressive policy.

But that still leaves us with the taxation part being regressive. For, obviously enough, it is possible to have some progressive form of taxation to pay for the spending and thus make the overall policy stance rather more progressive.

Note that all of this is entirely independent of whether you think there should be more tax on booze. Or more spending upon the NHS. Or even whether the tax system, the benefits and spending one, should be more progressive, more regressive or anything else.

Taxing alcohol is regressive taxation. That’s just what it is, whatever the casuistry of those urging us to pile imposts upon the modest pleasures of the working man. The IAS can go boil their heads on this one.