You’ve got to stop quoting Reason. It just hasn’t been the same since they’ve went full TDS.

Meh.
1. The wine industries of Europe benefit from "growers associations" and government sponsored trade organizations. And the farmers get direct subsidies.

2. Plenty of small American vineyards will step up to fulfill the demand.

This is like claiming that if you banned Heineken, nobody would drink Budweiser… Hard to believe American production would not step up .

Show that American exports go away.

This isn’t as simple as it seems, and isn’t a good example of other trade battles.

Have you been wine shopping recently? It's all California wines now. Where the local wine shop used to have a wide selection of European wines, now it's all California varietals. The European wines are relegated to a special section, a small section.

Those of us who enjoy the subtlety of a nice Bourdeaux are now stuck trying to find subtle in California-inspired fruit-forward wines with "big, bold" taste. The concept of terroir no longer matters in wine production and consumption as vintners mix grapes from several vineyards to get that bold fruit flavor that consumers are demanding.

Besides wine and beer are dying as Millennials, thanks to restrictive drinking age laws, prefer cocktails and spirits, the result of having to hide their alcohol consumption in soda bottles for so long. Very few of them were allowed to develop a palate for fine wine or even a nice microbrew.

Pre-gaming had first emerged in the mid-1980s, long before any of the current Betas were born. Congress, acting as institutional scold, passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which withheld highway funds from states that didn’t raise their drinking age to twenty-one. Most states caved immediately. Louisiana held out for a little while, but Northeastern states folded faster than you could say, “Jäger shot.” The effect on college campuses was complicated, and not at all what any Washington politicians might have imagined, assuming they’d given it any thought. Colleges were forced to implement compliance regimes to keep an army of avaricious tort lawyers at bay. Complicating matters, most seniors could still legally partake, while underclassmen could not, creating a great schism of haves and have-nots and a compliance nightmare. No one really thought underclassmen were going to abstain; this was college, and no Devon freshman walked through Phipps Gate without having seen Animal House, howling at the sight of John Belushi smiting beer bottles on his head. The federal fucking government was not going to get in the way of a good party, no sir. But big, campus-wide parties? Those were now a thing of the past. Students slithered into the nooks and crannies, mainly dorm rooms and fraternities, consuming what they wanted behind closed doors where they wouldn’t be caught by RAs and other mandated busybodies. Beer, the college beverage of choice since the first student was forced to read Proust, faded away. Too bulky. No way to sneak a keg into your dorm.

Vodka was the new poison, its primary virtue lying in its efficiency—a mere ounce was equivalent to a whole beer, so it was easy to sneak around, and it mixed with about anything. Gatorade, say. No RA would be the wiser if you were sipping from a Gatorade bottle.

~ Scott Johnston (Campusland

Without the US market, the European wine industry is kaput. Importers and distributors would definitely suffer if European labels were to become unavailable or double in price.

They need us more than we need them. Now, does that mean we need to impose tariffs on imported wines? Well, not in the aggregate, but to compel certain behaviors, tariffs might prove useful.

The tariffs would be on an industry very important to the Europeans (namely, the French) and imposed in order to compel the European Union to stop subsidizing Airbus and let it compete freely with Boeing. That Boeing has recently shot itself in the foot should cool some of the ardor for leveling the playing field through trade war tactics, but it probably won't.

Most of Trump's tariffs have been imposed more to compel free trade than to restrict it. However, his free-trade brinksmanship may have consequences he has not foreseen and should be undertaken with a caution not usually seen in his policies.

Trump is more Jacksonian than isolationist. He's not seeking to isolate America from the world but to insulate it, to overturn trade deals and military alliances that weighed heavily on Americans, but lightly on the partners. One cannot have free trade where one's partner is able to take advantage of one without something to balance the scales - i.e., China and it's disdain for intellectual property; Europe and its subsidized industries competing with unsubsidized American competitors; Mexico with its lower labor rates in assembly-line manufacturing.

To paraphrase Victor Davis Hanson, I don't know if the US can withstand a second Donald Trump assuming office, but this one might be exactly what we needed to correct a trend in our politics that has our politicians sacrificing US needs to pacify the rest of the world, that has them sacrificing the US economy on the altar of identity politics.

If nothing else, Trump has done what Leftist activists claim is a very important thing to do, he's "started a conversation." People are discussing economics and the proper role of government in a nation's economy.

World ending, women and children hit hardest.

It is always the little guy getting wiped out. Implement tariffs he gets wiped out. Don't implement them and some other little guy gets wiped out. Considering that the labor participation rate is increasing and wages are rising this isn't persuasive at all.

> You’ve got to stop quoting Reason.

"Cancel Culture," they call that.

Did you know that when Chinese goods got hit with tariffs, more than a few manufacturers moved their production to other, more friendly countries like Thailand and Vietnam?

You know what else hurts the little guy? Corporate taxes. While corporations make efficient points of taxation and collection, they're not actually paying the tax. They simply add it to the cost of the product or service. Anyone who can not adequately price their product or service is not going to last very long.

People pay taxes, not corporations.

To add to what Conan said, the EU has a habit of using environmental and food-safety laws as pretenses to block or tariff imports. It's a backdoor around WTO agreements. Trump is trying to make a point about that. (It's worth noting that not only does the EU do that sort of thing to non-EU imports, but individual EU nations also do it to each other. France is notorious for using environmental laws to shield its agriculture industry, even as they impose ruinous taxes and energy costs on farms. France, man.)

The millenials were hardly the first ones to have a drinking age... Gen X drinks plenty of wine.

The Wall Street Journal today reported a study showing that, overall, the negative effects of Trump's tariffs have been minimal on the U.S. economy.

The millenials were hardly the first ones to have a drinking age... Gen X drinks plenty of wine. ~ NicoleK at January 13, 2020 11:15 AM

Nicole, Millennials were the first to run up against one in college.

Until the 1984 highway funding law, states set their own drinking ages (a relic of the deal that ended Prohibition). Most used 18 as a barrier, meaning almost all incoming freshman in college could drink something alcoholic. The 1984 law mandated all states set their drinking ages for any alcohol to 21 or lose federal highway funds.

Many states were slow to comply (e.g., 18 for beer and wine, 21 for spirits), but all eventually did comply. That meant that Millennials and Gen-Z have always faced a 21-yo drinking age limit while Gen-X did not.

Even if we use the arguable 1965 beginning age for Gen-X, that means many of the earliest X-ers came of age with an 18-yo drinking age, depending upon their state laws.

The deadline to meet the 21 yo drinking age was October 1986 - giving a portion of Gen-X at least some experience being of legal drinking age before the federal law made it 21.

In addition, X-ers hit the drinking age as it changed - not enough time to adopt the pre-gaming culture Millennials and Z-ers would later adopt. Big campus-wide parties or smaller beer-and-wine mixers were still normal then.

I remember college and high school friends upset that they just missed being grandfathered in under the law. Florida staggered the age increase, so if you were of legal age when it was raised to the next stage, you got grandfathered.

I like you because you've done the reading.

Re: Gatorade, I saw a Twitter video a few years ago showing young people eagerly mixing vodka into their Emergen-C.

As if to party.

I mean, just imagine taking something like that in your body.

This always seems like some version of squeezing a water balloon.

Back around 1968 the gubmint decided to stop importing cheap pocket guns, and Southern California immediately began making cheap pocket guns.

Bingo bango bongo, the market wins again.

Emphasis on the bango.

(Gog, have you heard this? It was released last month. I'd never heard the expression BBB before.)

(It's a new playout of two takes, not the actual track used for the final piece. Note the platform shift in the drums at 2:24; in the actual mixdown, 2:15-2:33 is excised.)

(This is, by the way, the melody which will herald my eagerly-anticipated arrival in Hell.)

Interesting Conan. I've always been on the younger side in school. It was annoying when my classmates would go to the bar after a test and I couldn't get anything. Though money was as much an issue as age.

I'm guessing the stats will show millenials didn't drink any less than the generations before them. But yes I do think it is normal to take a coke bottle, dump 1/3 of the coke, and fill it up with your alcohol of choice. Plenty of people did that in high school and the habit still endures to today. Not for me personally but for plenty of my friends. I've also been told when I was drinking wine at a party that wine is for the well educated. For me it was just ease (no mixing) and taste at the time. Making skittle infused vodka may taste nice but it is far too much work for me to bother with.

While corporations make efficient points of taxation and collection, they're not actually paying the tax. They simply add it to the cost of the product or service.

It's not quite that simple. You're correct that the corporation doesn't pay the tax, but the people who do are not only their customers. The cost of the taxes "paid" by any given corporation falls on that corporation's customers, suppliers, employees (including management) and stockholders. How it's divided among these entities is determined by a constantly changing complex of market forces.

I went to an event held at huge restaurant/wine shop about 5 years ago and I would estimate that only 10% of their selection was European. They had CA, Washington, Oregon and from all over the US...even one from Alaska. Lots of Australian and Chilean.

When my brother went off to college he went to a college in a state where the drinking age was 21, but 20 minutes away was the state line to a state that was still 18,but then almost immediately switched it to 21 but my brother was grandfathered in -- just barely.

I was always one of the oldest in school. In college my "big brother" was a grade ahead of me and 3 days younger than me.

As far as wine drinking goes, I don't see many of my friends drinking wine. Much more of my brothers friends are wine drinkers. In college it was vodka or beer -- maybe rum -- beer was so much cheaper than wine.

I think it might be a family taught thing. When I was really little the older teenagers were expected to drink watered down wine at the big family get togethers. By the time my brother was that age it was strictly forbidden.

"It was released last month"

No but it makes me realize how much the rest of the band was doing behind Frank.

BBB was just an old saying. Vishnu only knows where I originally heard it!