Comment by umanwizard
1 day ago
This vaguely reminds me of the fact that in many countries, pure ethanol sold for industrial purposes is intentionally made poisonous, so you can’t drink it and thus merchants don’t have to charge the taxes on it that they would for spirits.
It's more like "so you can't drink it" without the taxes part. Those taxes play important role in reducing alcohol consumption (though they are of course not the only tool), so making cheap ethanol poisonous and with different color closes the loophole in healthcare policy rather than opens a loophole in taxation.
E.g. study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3860576/
Every legal allowance I disagree with is a "loophole", every legal allowance I take advantage of is intended functionality.
I think if it's working as intended and as designed then it's hard to call it a loophole. Loophole would be when dying your spirit purple would change the taxation, because someone codified the color of alcohol instead of it's content.
But of course as you say it's largely semantics.
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> making cheap ethanol poisonous and with different color closes the loophole in healthcare policy
I have never seen this as anything other than the death penalty for evading taxes. If the tax were designed to reduce consumption across the population, it needs to scale with income or net worth. Otherwise, it's just a tax on the poor.
I’m not sure how this is different from what I’m saying?
The thread is about bad things because of tax policy, your post is about a good thing because of health policy - but you don’t say it’s a good thing, or that it’s about heath not taxes.
The post pointing this out has different content to yours, which reads as if your meaning is “this reminds me of another bad thing caused by tax policies” - even if that’s not what you meant.
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Couldn't they just make it taste bad, for safety's sake?
In some countries it's done so and poisoning is banned. E.g. Finland and Poland got an exemption from the EU to do this because so many people died from the poisonings.
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Chinese cooking wines avoid alcohol taxes by adding salt. The salt is useful as a seasoning for food but makes the wine undrinkable!
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That doesn't seem to stop people from drinking IPAs.
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Addiction is one helluva motivator, and some people will put up with horrible tasting stuff as long as it's a cheap high.
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Chicago does it: https://malort.com/
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In some countries that is allowed, but in others it has to actually be poisonous.
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FWIW, many countries no longer allow denaturing via poisonous agents, just via extremely unpleasant tasting ones (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatonium).
I heat my house with oil, a truck comes every couple of months and fills a massive tank in my back yard.
This "oil" is basically diesel. It smells and feels identical to diesel. But it's about 70 cents cheaper per litre compared to road diesel. It's dyed red, and you are not supposed to put it in your car, but I reckon it'll be more than fine for older diesel engines.
The red diesel is not taxed like road diesel, and is much cheaper.
Here, that's commonly called red diesel (despite them changing to green decades ago) and it's sold for agricultural use. There are a number of cross border smuggling operations where criminals remove the dye and resell it for somewhere between the two prices.
Though primarily done to trucks, there are occasional fuel tests done by police. Even if your tank is currently clean, they'll occasionally pull out the fuel filters and check those for dye.
> I reckon it'll be more than fine for older diesel engines
There's always the risk of getting your fuel tank dipped if you're on road. Moreso for trucks, but some jurisdictions will set up inspections and check for dyed fuel and tear you an absolute new one when they catch it.
The exit of off road events is a common place to check this. So much so that there is a reputation in the off road community and now they don't even need to check often anymore since nobody is stupid enough to risk driving a truck that has ever had off road fuel in it there.