Of course. Raising taxes is the liberal solution for almost everything.

P.J. Gladnick of News Busters reported.

New York Mag Writer: Reduce Campus Rapes by Raising Beer Tax; Smoking More Dope

It is only a couple of weeks into the new year but it looks like we already have a strong contender for the dopiest article of the year, emphasis on “dope” as we shall see. A bizarre solution to reducing campus rapes comes to us by way of Annie Lowrey of New York magazine. Her solution is to raise taxes on beer while also encouraging people to smoke more marijuana. After acknowledging that the Rolling Stone story about a drunken fraternity rape case was just a fairy tale, Lowrey takes a deep plunge into the world of utterly stupid:

Whatever happened in that discredited Rolling Stone story, whether the proportion of female students victimized by campus sexual assault is 0.6 percent or 20 percent, even if crime rates are falling, far too many women and men face incidences of sexual harassment and abuse in a given year. But economists have one little-discussed way to help drive down rates of abuse: raise taxes.

The taxes in question are alcohol taxes. They are a surprisingly powerful tool to stem alcohol abuse and binge drinking. And they have tremendous knock-on effects on crime rates.

Which economists were these, Annie? I really would like to know who was stupid enough to want to punish 99.99999% of us in order to supposedly hinder a minuscule number of people via a highly dubious method. Now Lowrey tosses a ridiculous statistic at us:

Social scientists and public-policy types have long recognized the deep linkages between alcohol use and crime on college campuses. According to government research, every year, 97,000 students are “victims of alcohol-related sexual assault or date rape,” with alcohol consumption having a profound effect on perpetrators’ behavior. Alcohol reduces inhibition and attention to social cues, and increases aggression. Individuals also use it to justify and abet assault, or to muddy a victim’s memory of and manipulate his or her feelings about the act in question.