Beer and taxes: priorities don't seem to change. (Commentary).

WHAT'S the most anti-tax city in America? What town echoes like no other with full-throated denunciations of Washington greed heads gobbling up almost $2 trillion of other people's money to serve their Big Government schemes?

Washington, of course. And Washington is never more anti-Washington than around the tax-filing deadline. Everyone gets grumpy on April 15, but to judge by a stroll around Capitol Hill, Washington's grumpiness, calculated per capita, takes the prize. We even import grumpy people.

Take beer wholesalers. I began my day with several hundred of them, from all over the country. (Who would refuse a breakfast sponsored by the National Beer Wholesalers Association?) Most beer wholesalers have the substantial, well-fed look you'd expect from wholesalers of anything, especially beer.

And they have the cheerful disposition to go with it, but when the talk turns to taxes, their mood grows dark. "Our focus here," Association president David K. Rehr told the wholesalers, "is making sure the bad guys in Washington don't change the culture of beer."

So the wholesalers came to Washington on Tax Day to lobby their congressmen against beer taxes. "Let them know we will do everything we can to return pro-beer incumbents to the House and Senate," Rehr said.

They armed themselves with the best facts money can buy, each rendered with eerie precision. The Beer Institute commissioned a study from DRI/McGraw Hill, which discovered -- you won't be shocked -- that beer taxes are economically counterproductive: After considering depressive effects, each dollar of tax levied brings in only 50 cents in revenue.

Conversely, and almost miraculously, if the beer tax were cut, the macroeconomic benefits would be such that "every $4 in reduced excise taxes would actually cost the government only $1 in lower net revenues."

Further, beer taxes are a threat to public health. How so?

Well, moderate alcohol consumption can be healthy. Beer taxes force moderate drinkers to drink less alcohol or give it up entirely. Thus, according to studies cited by the association: "More than 80,000 lives would be lost each year if light and moderate drinkers were forced into becoming abstainers."

I don't know whether the lobbying group Americans for Tax Reform is pro-beer, but it is definitely anti-tax. I left the wholesalers' breakfast early so I could get to ATR's annual Tax Day rally outside the Capitol building, where grass-roots Americans would gather to protest the burden of tyrannical taxation.

"Our citizens have been hard hit by the Alternative Minimum Tax," said a speaker from Reform AMT. "AMT is unfair to citizens with incentive stock options!"

"We need to eliminate the Democratic side if we are to get any relief from taxes," said Ross Pierpont of the Association of Concerned Taxpayers.

"We condemn the socialist security system," said the representative of Young Americans for Freedom.

Across the street, in a cavernous and gilded House hearing room, a slightly larger group of Capitol Hill interns sat amid clusters of red and blue balloons under TV lights. They were attending House Majority Leader Dick Armey's "National Town Hall Forum" on taxes. More precisely, they WERE the national town hall forum.

Armey introduced several congressmen, who turned to smile at the C-Span cameras as though they had just been plucked from the audience of "The Price Is Right."

"I want to thank you for your leadership, Congressman Armey," said Congressman Jim DeMint.

"You really have a passion for this, don't you, Jim?" Armey said.

"Well," DeMint replied, "I have four kids at home."

They brought up a couple from Virginia, Rueben and Brenda Castilla, who said they had saved $1,800 on their tax bill thanks to last year's tax cuts.

Show trials in 1930s Russia had more spontaneity than Armey's town hall, and in 1930s Russia the marginal rates were higher. For a believer in low taxes, it's unsettling to think that anti-tax advocacy in Washington relies so heavily on the tactics of stage management.

After the town hall, I asked Brenda Castilla, the housewife from Virginia, how she had been recruited for the town hall. She said some friends who work in Republican politics had asked her to appear with Armey.

"They said they needed a couple to kind of speak up for the tax cut," she said. "And they were having trouble finding normal people."

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.