Best Business Commentary

Beer became legal 75 years ago today, after 13 years of Prohibition, says Maureen Ogle in the Los Angeles Times. A “misguided” bipartisan Senate package aspires to give the “battered housing market a boost,” says John M. Berry in Bloomberg.

A toast to the beer stimulus

Beer became legal 75 years ago today, after 13 years of Prohibition, says Maureen Ogle in the Los Angeles Times, reopening “the spigot on a significant source of both jobs and revenue.” Formal repeal of Prohibition came eight months later, but the legalization of beer was one of FDR’s first acts in office, and its success helped pave the way for his New Deal. While many of his “bold” New Deal proposals bred a “stew of unease,” the beer bill brought the “comfort” of “immediate, predictable, and positive” results: “jobs and tax revenues.” Beer alone didn’t “undo the economic disaster or heal the nation’s spiritual malaise” from the Great Depression, but it sure helped.

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