As I blogged about earlier many states in the US,  facing budget shortcomings of their own making are looking at beer and wine tax increases as a way to make some cash. One of my assertions, beside the fundamental stupidity of penalizing production and wealth creation, is that such tax increases will hurt employees and pubs hardest. To back that up we can take the UK as an example—they are experiencing the roosting chickens of Chancellor Darling’s 2008 beer tax in the…

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When the Germans are laughing at you, things are in a pretty serious mess. That’s the case with the British version of the bailout, which the German finance minister has just ridiculed:

Criticising the UK government’s decision to cut VAT from 17.5% to 15%, Mr Steinbruck questioned how effective this will be.

“Are you really going to buy a DVD player because it now costs £39.10 instead of £39.90?” he said.

“All this will do is raise Britain’s debt to a level that…

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