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Photo: Patrick Seeger / picture-alliance / dpa
In the pandemic, citizens are obviously reaching for bottles and cigarettes more often again.
While sales tax revenue plummeted in the Corona year 2020, income from taxes on alcohol and tobacco increased, according to information from SPIEGEL, in some cases strongly.
This emerges from the 2020 annual financial statements for the Budget Committee.
The tax authorities collected around 2.2 billion euros in liquor tax in 2020, six percent more than in the previous year.
The same applies to the sparkling wine tax.
It flushed 405 million euros into the coffers, 5.5 percent more than in 2019. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (SPD) had expected falling income for both taxes.
Only the revenue from taxes on alcopops fell short of the expectations of 15 million euros at eleven million euros.
However, the tax authorities only received one million euros of this in 2019.
The volume increased by 1000 percent within a year.
Because restaurants and pubs were closed for months, Germans drank more at home.
The increased consumption is apparently only concentrated on hard alcoholic beverages, wine and sparkling wine. The demand for beer, on the other hand, also fell last year.
Brewers have complained in the past few weeks that they had been left with their production.
Many manufacturers felt compelled to throw away their beer by kegs because the best before date had passed.
In the past year, the federal government also received more tobacco tax than planned.
Income rose to 14.7 billion euros, an increase of almost three percent over the previous year.
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