Tax-hikers are coming for your meat

Source: Washington Examiner | April 25, 2018 | Tyler Tate

Global warming activists have failed for years to impose a federal carbon tax, most recently failing to incorporate a carbon tax into last year’s landmark tax reform law. Acknowledging the difficulty of imposing a massive new energy tax, these radical activists are now pushing a double-digit excise tax on American meat. This latest effort to push people around poses a direct threat to grocery affordability, consumer choice, and jobs.

Meat-tax pushers argue that because livestock emit methane, the U.S. should impose exorbitant “sin” taxes to make meat too expensive for Americans. These busybodies want to demonize eating meat. They want to prevent people from enjoying juicy burgers, tender chicken wings, and other foods they look down upon.

Making meat unaffordable through taxation has support among radical environmentalists who promote government coercion to “solve” global warming. For example, Germany’s federal environmental agency has proposed a 19 percent meat tax to comply with the Paris Climate Agreement and United Nations emissions goals.

This international support is spilling into the U.S. Recently, meat tax advocates waged a PR effort by publishing op-eds in support of the tax in the New York Times, Bloomberg, and Fortune magazine. A coalition led by PETA, environmental extremists, and self-proclaimed “public health” advocates is forming to push for a federal meat tax.

The threat is real. The Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return, an organization representing investors with assets exceeding $4 trillion, recently estimated that the federal government could impose a meat tax within five years.

If they succeed, American consumers and the economy writ large will pay the price. By their own admission, targeted meat and cattle taxes are designed to make everyday groceries unaffordable for most Americans. Under one proposal by French researchers and supported in the opinion section of the New York Times, beef prices would increase by 41 percent, chicken by 32 percent, dairy by 26 percent, eggs by 23 percent, pork by 17 percent, and poultry by 15 percent.

This tax would destroy the meat and cattle industries, and many Americans would lose their jobs. Companies involved in meat production employ 6.2 million people with salaries totaling $200 billion. If meat tax proponents succeed, it is unknown how many of those Americans would lose their jobs from consumption decreases.

The industry also generates $864.2 billion in economic activity and $81.2 billion in tax revenue. Assaulting this industry would eliminate key sales and income tax streams, negatively impacting state education, public safety, and infrastructure funds nationwide.

A meat tax disproportionately harms low and middle-income Americans, since they spend a higher proportion of their budgets on groceries. This budget difference results in lower- and middle-income Americans paying 4.7-7 percent of their income on consumption sales taxes, compared to only 0.8 percent for upper-income Americans.

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