Speaking of government expenditures and demon rum…
You know what else outweighs the $189.4 million federal Rural Health Transformation grant Governor Larry Rhoden announced yesterday? The $350 million plus that taxpayers spend cleaning up the messes created by drunks in South Dakota each year.
In 2015, Dr. Jeffrey Sacks and a team of other public health experts calculated costs of excessive alcohol consumption. They figured that in 2010, excessive drinking did $249 billion dollars of economic damage to the United States. Two-fifths of that cost, $101 billion, took the form of taxpayer dollars burned up in health care, lost productivity, law enforcement, and other government responses.
In South Dakota, the total economic harm of boozehoundery was $598 million. The cost to South Dakota taxpayers was $241 million. Assume similar bad booze behavior and adjust those figures for inflation, and in 2025, drunkenness cost South Dakota taxpayers $356 million, 1.9 times more than the Trump bucks we’re getting to prop up rural health care in South Dakota.
We don’t need to reinstate prohibition to recoup those losses. We could save $356 million in the state budget just by not putting up with anyone else getting drunk and capping our own drinking at one or none.
Legislators, lead the way! When the lobbyists come to wine and dine you this Session, make a point of asking for a cherry coke instead of the harder brews. Stopping the budgetary bleeding starts with you and the drink in your hand.
But, a red moocher state like South Dakota is powered by sin: video lootery and a too-big-to-jail banking racket fill in the gaps created by lobbyists who enjoy the protection of single-party tyranny. In 2018 it was determined that the annual criminal costs of video lootery in South Dakota have soared to $42 million and the social costs an estimated $62 million. $9 million were lost because state and local sales taxes weren’t collected. When video lootery began in 1986 104 charges were filed for robbery, grand theft and aggravated theft. There were 1,037 cases in 1990 and in 2017 they went past 4,000 yet South Dakota continues to raise revenues off those least able to pay.
South Dakota values, huh? If “faith, family, and freedom” really guided your choices, you probably wouldn’t be leading the nation in “freedom to plow into a ditch after last call.” Minnesota and Nebraska somehow manage to drink beer and not treat the highway like a slalom course, so clearly the issue isn’t the barley.
Maybe it’s because you’ve built a state where the only nightlife option is a bar with video lottery machines, the nearest neighbor is 12 miles away, and the designated driver is “whichever cousin hasn’t lost their license this month.”
But sure, keep pretending DUIs are just a moral failing INSTEAD of the predictable outcome of zero transit, long distances, and a political culture that treats basic safety like tyranny.
If y’all actually wanted to fix this, you wouldn’t need a nanny state. You’d just need options. A ride. A shuttle. A community norm that doesn’t treat driving drunk as a quirky frontier tradition. Until then, the only “South Dakota value” you’re leading the nation in is preventable tragedies.
PS … drinking on NYE is for amateurs.
Saving lobbists money as Mr. H urges is all good and fine, but most in the legislatures will view out-of-state church-ladies castigating them for a nice Glencairn glass of Scotch, or perhaps three, as nanny-staters, although grudznick does like the term “boozehoundery.” We all must strive to use it more.
Porter, you remind me that my college (USD) friends all referred to New Year’s Eve as “amateur night.”
A good concept is allowing neighborhood bars. Not perfect but it would cut the cost quite a bit. Falling on a concrete walkway is hard but better than smashing someone else with your vehicle.