"Benfez" wrote:


"www.taxmeat.com" wrote in message
om...
IT IS TIME FOR AN EXCISE TAX ON MEAT!

More than 26 billion animals are slaughtered for food every year in
the United States alone. The companies that raise and kill animals for
food represent a multibillion-dollar industry, and the U.S. government
has been giving them tens of billions of dollars in price supports and
subsidies every year. It is unfair and un-American that the 26 percent
of the population who are decreasing their meat intake, and the 6 to 7
percent who identify themselves as vegetarians, are forced to pay the
costs attributable to other people's behavior.

Our proposal entails a 10-cents-per-pound excise tax to be paid on
meat in the same way that the gasoline, tobacco, and alcohol taxes are
paid so that the tax is figured into the retail price. In 2000, total
meat consumption amounted to 196 pounds per person. Collectively, the
United States consumes 53.7 billion pounds of animal flesh. The amount
of money that could be raised with a tax on meat is staggering.
Federal taxes of 34 cents per pack of cigarettes generate revenue of
$6.3 billion per year. An alcohol tax of $7 to $14 per gallon of grain
alcohol (depending on type) generated $8.1 billion. Federal excise
taxes, in total, generated roughly $70 billion. A 10-cents-per-pound
meat tax would generate revenue of roughly $5.4 billion.

Meat prices would go up only a few cents per pound because part of the
tax would be absorbed by meat-industry corporations and part of the
tax would be passed on to consumers, as demonstrated by the gas,
tobacco, and alcohol taxes. The average meat-eating American could
expect to pay about $15 per year in meat taxes-hardly a financial
imposition-while vegetarians would pay nothing. However, our
assumption is that as people learned about the health and
environmental consequences of eating meat, consumption of meat would
slowly fall, thus lowering the price per person of the tax and
alleviating some of the health and environmental impacts of raising
animals for food.

FAQ's

**What should be done with the revenue this tax generates?**

The money generated could be put into health education and
preventative medicine. The vast majority of illnesses in this country
can be prevented with simple lifestyle choices, including a low-fat
vegan diet.


**What about all the farmers who will lose their jobs?**

The day of the family farm is long past. There are currently 250,000
fewer farms today than there were 20 years ago. Eighty percent of the
35 million beef cattle slaughtered annually in the U.S. are
concentrated into the hands of four huge corporations, and two percent
of feedlots control eighty five percent of operations . Vegetarianism
is catching on, but it's not throwing people out of work nearly as
fast as agribusiness consolidation. Small farmers lost out to the
industrialism that is slaughtering more animals with fewer people and
more machinery. This same agricultural revolution is breeding turkeys
who can no longer reproduce and is pumping cows full of hormones and
antibiotics that force them to grow more quickly and give more milk.
Mammoth factory farms are the only losers under this proposal.

And agribusiness is no friend of the workers. A meatpacking plant is
still one of the most dangerous places in the country to work, with an
outrageous injury and illness rate of 9.2 per 100 workers. According
to the Center for Public Integrity: "Punishing conditions, low wages,
and frequent injuries result in high turnover at meatpacking plants
... For the last two decades, they've turned to immigrant workers from
Mexico ... But just as easily as the meatpacking companies court and
transport immigrant labor to their Midwestern plants, they betray
them, turning them and their families over to immigration
authorities."


**Does PETA really care about human health and the environment?**

PETA believes that compassion is limitless. We care about all animals,
including humans. Our meat tax proposal makes sense, economically and
environmentally.

Additionally, Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute suggests that a
meat tax might be the only way to move toward having enough grain to
feed the world's feed the world's 830 million starving people and the
1.3 billion who live on less than one dollar per day. He notes that we
no longer have enough surplus grain or idle land to increase crop
output. Thus, he suggests a tax on meat as a way to move away from
using grain and water to raise animals for food. He says that this may
be "the key to maintaining political stability and sustaining economic
progress in low- income countries."


**Aren't there health costs attributable to eating pesticides?**

At least 95 percent of human dioxin exposure come from animal
products. This is because such residues are stored in the animals' fat
and muscle. Each step up the food chain serves to amplify the
consumption of toxins. Due to excessive use of pesticides,
insecticides, and petrochemical fertilizers on cropland, and the
injection of hormones and antibiotics into animals raised for food,
eating animals is a toxic endeavor. In fact, meat contains 14 times
more pesticide residues than do plant foods.

This doesn't even consider direct food poisoning from campylobacter,
salmonella, E.coli, and other bacteria. Gail Eisnitz states in her
book, Slaughterhouse, that "deadly, contaminated meat is pouring out
of those plants, and I have the documentation to prove it." E Magazine
states, quoting the Atlanta Journal Constitution, that "millions of
chickens 'leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by
harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous
tumors or skin conditions, are shipped for sale to consumers.' Nicols
Fox, author of Spoiled, a book about food safety, says that "there are
actually cases where people have become seriously ill because the
spatula was used to transfer an uncooked, then a cooked burger. To me
it is like asking the consumer to operate a kind of biohazard lab..."

As indicated above, the enormous costs attributable to employment of
USDA inspectors, disability payments to injured workers, and illness
linked to tainted meat, are not included in Dr. Harris' $123 billion
price tag.


**Is this proposal politically feasible?**

Yes. However, Congress is bought and sold by agribusiness, as detailed
in a recent report by the Center for Public Integrity : "The meat
industry has been one of Washington's most effective influence
machines, partly by recruiting federal lawmakers and congressional
aids for its lobbying juggernaut ... From filling lawmakers' campaign
coffers to plying them with all-expenses-paid trips and dangling the
possibility of lucrative post- employment opportunities, the meat
interests have overwhelmed the supposedly objective decision-making
process in Washington." To quote John Stauber in his book Mad Cow USA,
"The recent bad news about meat is just the tip of the iceberg.
Governments and industry will do their best to protect the maximum
sales and consumption of meat and to cover up, ignore, and deny the
risks."

The link between meat eating and heart disease is as clear as the link
between smoking and lung cancer. We've overcome the enormous political
influence of the tobacco and alcohol lobbies; it is now time to
protect American consumers from the negative health impact of meat.
Every year, a million more Americans adopt a vegetarian diet, and it
is even more popular among the nation's youth - tomorrow's policy
makers.


courtesy of www.taxmeat.com

Sorry sunshine, I'm not in the habbit of having a go, and it isn't normally
in my nature to flame, but..

What the **** are you on about you quarter witted cretin. I am staggered
that anyone could be quite so ridiculous.

Where is your logic? Just because you dont like meat eating does not mean
you can foist your ideas on right minded people. You dont see normal folk
demanding a tax on lentils and ****ing chick peas do you?

I find chewing gum enormously offensive,... Oh I know lets tax the shit out
of that, and soccer shirts, and religion, that should be taxed off the
planet.. mmmm logic.


The logic appears to be use ANY excuse to impose yet another tax, to
feed the endlessly growing rapacity of big government.