Depending on your leanings, the White House's proposed federal budget provoked anger, resignation, exasperation, recrimination, or exasperated angry recrimination turned resignation. But one item deserves your attention. Namely, President Obama's proposal to repeal the "excise tax credit for distilled spirits with flavor and wine additives," which currently lets manufacturers that use those ingredients avoid up to half of their taxes. Some have deemed the move weird. We like to think of it as overcoming a longtime nemesis. Because when enacted at the beginning of 1980, that flavor additive tax credit nearly killed America's whiskey drinking.

But hippy parental-rebuke or no, whiskey was staggering.

The Change

For the decade and a half after the tax was enacted, liquor drinking fell, along with the rest of the economy. Americans consumed less non-whiskey spirits; whiskey drinking kept plummeting along the crash-path that began a decade earlier. But amid the decline, big changes happened within the spirits industry. By '81, Bacardi rum became the biggest-selling brand in the States. Out of nowhere, Baileys Irish Cream (a liqueur) went from making $500,000 in '78 to between about $16 million in '81. Canada's Seagram's posted a record fourth quarter. And Americans drank more wine than liquor for the first time ever. They didn't even drink the tinted reds. They drank whites — the clear stuff.

A decade and a half later, said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the tax credit proved so large and valuable and advantageous that distillers began using wine and flavors in their liquor — even when it made production more expensive. The bureau used gin as an example. Even though it was more costly, distillers were choosing to flavor their gin with that artificial juniper berry flavor instead of letting it naturally ferment (which is comparatively inexpensive). Because if they fermented, they'd get taxed the old way; if they used the artificial flavors, the tax break rewarded them so handsomely that despite higher costs, it still became more profitable. In '95, a budget proposal in the Senate recommended repealing the credit for those market quirks. But the proposal didn't make it.

recent report pegged the total number of vodka flavors at 175.) Because whiskey's United States market share remains a shadow of its glory days. As of 2010, according to the Impact report, non-whiskey spirits accounted for 77 percent of America's liquor consumption. American whiskey barely hit 21 percent — again, in the '60s, it had three times that.

So, if Obama's budget or something like it comes to be, finally damning the tax credit that has hurt the brown for decades, we shall spit Good riddance. With, like usual, a tumbler of whiskey in hand.

Nate Hopper Associate editor Nate Hopper is an associate editor for Esquire magazine.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io