While I am not always successful, I often seek to understand what drives the mental processes of those who devote their lives to meddling with other people's lives.

Sometimes, though, these mental processes prove very difficult to understand, as I found when I read this report about a Michigan state task force which wants to raise taxes on beer -- in order to help the children!

The Michigan Child Welfare Improvement Task Force plans to recommend a higher tax on beer in Michigan, raising the tax from two to five cents per 12 ounces of beer, or about one can, in bars, grocery stores and wholesale stores. The money from the tax rate increase will go toward prevention programs for child abuse and neglect and to help children in the foster care system.

Patrick Babcock, a co-chair of the task force, said raising the taxes on beer would have a large impact on child abuse prevention programs.

"If the legislature were to adopt the five-cent proposal, we could raise as much as $110 million per year," Babcock said. "And for five cents on the bottle, we think it's a small amount to be able to protect our children."

That's because (according to Babcock) there's a connection between alcoholism and child abuse, so beer must therefore be the culprit!

Babcock added that the group chose to tax beer because of high trends of alcoholism among abusive or neglectful parents.

"There is a relationship between the ingestion of alcohol and child abuse and neglect," Babcock said. "Though it is not always the case, there is often alcohol involved in cases of child abuse and neglect."

Fortunately, the beer tax faces opposition in the state senate, but it never ceases to amaze me the way people make these tenuous connections by plugging in their favorite causes. No doubt feminists could claim there's a correlation between alcohol and rape, and demand another beer tax for rape crisis centers. Perhaps MADD could get in on the tax action (if they're not already).

If you think Michigan bureaucrats are crazy, in Oregon they're proposing to raise the beer tax a whopping 1,900% -- to pay for (among other things) drug treatment. Never mind that this will seriously hurt the state's economy:

....The state may do this even though Oregon is the second largest microbrewery producer in the U.S. The beer industry and its 96 breweries contribute 5,000 jobs and $2.25 billion to state GDP. Kurt Widmer of Widmer Brewing Co. says the tax would "devastate our company and small breweries throughout the state." Adds Joe Henchman, director of state projects at the Tax Foundation, "This microbrewery industry has gravitated to Oregon in part due to low beer taxes."

For Oregon to enact punitive taxes on its homegrown beer industry makes as much sense as Idaho slapping an excise tax on potatoes or for New York to tax stock trading. Even without the tax increase, taxes are the single most expensive ingredient in a glass of beer, according to the Oregon Brewers Guild.