If this is the best they can come up with, we're in trouble.

The Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Montana's own Sen. Max Baucus, uncorked a plan last week to raise a glass, err, taxes, on beer, wine and hard alcohol to help provide health insurance for all Americans.

The logic is to tax the lifestyle choices that contribute to health problems and rising medical costs.

To help fund what they say is the necessary $1.5 trillion over 10 years to insure 50 million Americans, Baucus and his peers want to raise the wine tax by 233 percent per bottle; the beer tax by 145 percent per six-pack; the hard alcohol tax by 19 percent per fifth.

In dollars and cents, those percentage increases equate to a bump of 49 cents per bottle of wine, up from the current 21 cents, to a total of 70 cents per bottle.

Beer taxes would increase by 48 cents a six-pack, up from the current 33 cents, to 81 cents per six-pack.

And the tax on hard liquor would increase by 40 cents per fifth, up from the current $2.14, to $2.54 per fifth.

But that logic is flawed on several levels, and is really a matter of poor effort and poor policy on behalf of our elected officials.

By increasing the beer and wine taxes, this type of legislation would cause a significant price increase for consumers. And how is singling out alcohol equitable? What's next, coffee for hypertension? Candy bars for obesity?

More so, this misguided proposal stands the chance to hurt many local breweries and wineries, as well as the distributors, and probably will cost some jobs in the process. Across Montana, microbreweries are some of the fastest-growing small businesses and, especially in Helena, produce some of the finest craft beers available anywhere.

Alcohol taxes nationally tend to be regressive, too, in that lower-income folks tend to buy more alcohol and end up paying more of the tax.

Indeed, health care reform is a top issue facing this nation, but we need to find a method of paying for it that is more evenly spread across income levels.

It's understandable that the authors are emulating what has been done with tobacco, but let's first look at the billions of dollars or more that could be saved in true health care reform, waste, outrageous billing and the abuse of "nonprofit" tax exemptions.

There has yet to be a clear, insightful or concrete health care reform proposal from the president or Congress, and this donkey-in-a-horse-race sure isn't it.

Give your congressional delegation a "toast" of your input.