Currently, there are bills being introduced in seven states that would lower the drinking age to 18. Three of the seven states, Wisconsin included, would lower the drinking age to 18 only to those serving in the military; the other four would lower it to 18 for everyone. Great. Awesome. Clearly, when I say “great” and “awesome” I mean “no.”
At first glance, this seems like a great idea ?– especially for the average under-21 college student who lives each weekend fearing an underage drinking ticket or risks spending $100 on a fake ID only to get it taken away. I’ve always been a believer in the “if you’re old enough to go to war and get shot at for this country, you’re old enough to have a drink” theory. Before turning 21, I thought it was ridiculous that I was considered an adult at 18, but the government still prevented me from doing two things (drinking is one, owning a handgun is the other). The more I think about it, though, there are several points to be made against this proposed legislation.
Point one is that many kids turn 18 when they’re still in high school. Now, I’m not stupid, and I’m not going to say that it never happens, but high school students should not be drinking. The easy solution would be to make the drinking age 19. Nearly everyone is out of high school by the time they reach that age, and it makes it so that most college kids have a year at most to wait before they can start legally doing what they’ve done for the past several months away from home.
There’s still a problem with lowering the drinking age to 19, though. We’d lose some — if not all — of our federal highway dollars. Right now, the state of Wisconsin is receiving in excess of $30 million dollars each year for our highway systems so long as we keep the legal drinking age at 21. With all of the snow and bad weather this past winter, we’ve got a lot of road work to do. If we lose $30 million to spend on fixing our roads, the state is going to have to raise our taxes. Higher taxes are the bane of the existence of the Republican Party. So clearly I’m arguing that we should leave the drinking age at 21 so we can get our federal funding for our roads, right? Wrong.
Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States of America does it say, “Congress shall blackmail the states into having a uniform drinking age.” Enter the 10th Amendment. If the federal government is not given a power in the Constitution, it should be left to the states. Why should we allow Congress — let alone a Congress that has a lower approval rating than the president — to control every minute detail of our lives? We shouldn’t. By requiring a 21-year-old drinking age, the federal government is taking power out of the hands of the citizens and establishing dominant rule. How acutely undemocratic.
It’s asinine to think that our federal highway dollars are tied to something so trivial as the drinking age. Having a drinking age of 21 does not stop underage drinking, does not prevent binge drinking and has not stopped drunken driving incidents. It would make more sense for the funding to be tied to keeping drunken driving incidents down — but even then the states would have their hands tied behind their backs by the federal government. With all due respect to the 1984 Congress: bad idea. Whether the state of Wisconsin wants their drinking age to be 21, 18, 12, or 30 should be left up to the state, and Congress should have no weight in the decision.
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Sara Mikolajczak ([email protected]) is the current chair of the UW-Madison College Republicans.
