The new tax law is prompting the usual crocodile tears from liberals, who complain (falsely) that it is a giveaway to evil multinational corporations and “the rich.”
But nowhere is the handwringing more anguished than in progressive Portland, Oregon. Why? One little-noticed provision in the new law slashes the excise tax in half on the first 60,000 barrels of beer produced by companies that make fewer than two million barrels a year. That’s a boon to Portland’s beloved craft beer industry.
The city’s alternative magazine, Willamette Week, estimates that Oregon’s 230 craft breweries will save $210,000 each in 2018, thanks to the tax break. And that’s leading to some uncomfortable questions in a state reflexively hostile to Republicans. As Willamette Week puts it: “In left-leaning, beer-guzzling Portland, the tax cut places craft brewers in an awkward position.”
Yet the position apparently isn’t so awkward that brewers are taking a principled stand and sending more money than required to Washington: “I don’t think anyone’s going to thumb their nose at it,” Ben Edmunds, brewmaster at Portland’s Breakside Brewery, told the publication. Instead, brewers said they’re inclined to “spend their windfall on new employees and tanks.”
Let’s all raise a glass to that.
