Say Anything Blog

I think most of the American public still thinks the idea of the government taxing cow and pig farts in the latest front in the war on global warming is a bad joke.  But it’s not.  They’re serious about this, and the expense to ranchers and dairy farmers is going to be huge if they get their way:

Call this one of the newest and innovative the ways your government has come up with to battle greenhouse gas emissions.
Indirectly it could be considered a cheeseburger tax, but one of the suggestions offered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) for regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act is to levy a tax on livestock.

The ANPR, released early this year, would give the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gas for not only greenhouse gas from manmade sources like transportation and industry, but also “stationary” sources which would include livestock.
The New York Farm Bureau assigned a price tag to the cost of greenhouse gas regulation by the EPA in a release last month.
“The tax for dairy cows could be $175 per cow, and $87.50 per head of beef cattle. The tax on hogs would upwards of $20 per hog,” the release said. “Any operation with more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle or 200 hogs would have to obtain permits.”

A rancher with 500 head of beef cattle would have to pay, annually, upwards of $43,750.

So what impact will this heavy new tax on our food supplies have?

For one thing, it’s either going to drive the cost of meat through the ceiling or the taxpayers are going to be asked to more heavily subsidize the ranching industry.  Either way, it’s more burden on the taxpayers at large not just ranchers.

For another, it could well kill the domestic ranching and dairy industries.  My guess is that we’ll be put on the hook for more subsidies to keep that from happening, but if we’re not a lot of ranches will go out of business.  And America will start importing its meat from countries that haven’t gone crazy and started taxing their cattle for the sake of global warming.

Unless, of course, that in turn prompts the protectionists to raise tariffs on imported meat.  At which point we’re back to Americans just flat out paying a hell of a lot more for their food either through direct prices or subsidies.

It’s a bad situation all the way around, and you have to wonder why so many are so willing to plunge us into it.  Do we really need to regulate cow farts?  What is the EPA’s objective?  To decrease the meet supply by taxing it, thus forcing more of us to be vegetarians?  Isn’t this a free country?  Can’t we just eat what we want?

And why cow farts?  Don’t animals in nature emit the same gases?  Don’t we humans emit the same gases?  What’s next, an EPA-levied tax on Taco Bell customers?

I’ve said before that with global warming alarmists claiming that the very air we exhale is a pollutant they have an excuse to exert government control over every aspect of our lives.  After all, if we can’t eat or breathe without polluting there’s no way we can avoid it.  It now appears as though the global warming alarmists have that very goal in mind.

And we, in turn, should all be very alarmed about that.