EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

[snakela]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

It is easier and more efficient to discourage something through taxation than through regulation. It is fair to require the entity that benefits from emitting a pollutant to compensate third parties who bear the cost of the pollutant.

The argument is about the cost.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

We own a dairy farm/herd in partnership.

With the current low dairy payouts pushing many less-efficient dairy farms to the edge of the cliff, fart taxation will push many over the edge and destroy a considerable amount of existing primary producing dairy capacity.

I see this as an effort to make taxation palatable along the lines of making a lower standard of living palatable.

Let me explain:

Legitimate Feminism gets hijacked to obscure increasing inflation and a declining standard of living by making Mom and Family somehow LOVE Mom not just having a full time job at home raising the kids, but a full time job out in the workforce as a "career woman" just to maintain the same standard of living with a few more bits of crap.....you go girl! My Mom's better than yours because she's got three jobs!

Legitimate Environmentalism gets hijacked to obscure government clipping the ticket on stuff going up in value during increasing inflation by making everyone somehow LOVE being taxed to "save the planet".....WOO! I stopped murdering mother nature! My no longer being able to afford dairy or meat had nothing to do with it! My carbon footprint is lower than yours!

I don't see it as a "vast conspiracy".

But I DO see such things as a simple "alignment of interests".

Global Warming is the "New Religion".

Al Gore is the new Jerry Falwell or Jim Baker, either or it doesn't matter.

The tithe to the Church of Mother Nature will be 10%

Dirty dairy farmers, dirty gold miners, dirty energy producers, and the rest of the dirty $inner$ get mandatory front row seats in the new church

Fundamentalism and Political Correctness are the Pillars of the new church, catch phrases like "carbon footprint" are the new gospel.

[jimmygu3]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

Yes. This is the 'Libertarian' argument I was commenting on originally. It's not 'Libertarian' at all. It's sociopathic.

Kudos on crystallizing that delineation, Rob. It's the difference between pragmatic, fiscally conservative, socially liberal intellectuals, and neoconservative sociopaths, both of whom use the term Libertarian.

-Jimmy

[metalman]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

We own a dairy farm/herd in partnership.

With the current low dairy payouts pushing many less-efficient dairy farms to the edge of the cliff, fart taxation will push many over the edge and destroy a considerable amount of existing primary producing dairy capacity.

I see this as an effort to make taxation palatable along the lines of making a lower standard of living palatable.

Let me explain:

Legitimate Feminism gets hijacked to obscure increasing inflation and a declining standard of living by making Mom and Family somehow LOVE Mom not just having a full time job at home raising the kids, but a full time job out in the workforce as a "career woman" just to maintain the same standard of living with a few more bits of crap.....you go girl! My Mom's better than yours because she's got three jobs!

Legitimate Environmentalism gets hijacked to obscure government clipping the ticket on stuff going up in value during increasing inflation by making everyone somehow LOVE being taxed to "save the planet".....WOO! I stopped murdering mother nature! My no longer being able to afford dairy or meat had nothing to do with it! My carbon footprint is lower than yours!

I don't see it as a "vast conspiracy".

But I DO see such things as a simple "alignment of interests".

Global Warming is the "New Religion".

Al Gore is the new Jerry Falwell or Jim Baker, either or it doesn't matter.

The tithe to the Church of Mother Nature will be 10%

Dirty dairy farmers, dirty gold miners, dirty energy producers, and the rest of the dirty $inner$ get mandatory front row seats in the new church

Fundamentalism and Political Correctness are the Pillars of the new church, catch phrases like "carbon footprint" are the new gospel.

wow. cannot possibly agree more.

americans can no longer live on 1 salary due to inflation, so the women's liberation movement is hijacked into a movement to make women feel like losers if they instead of building a 'career' focus on running the household.

the mystery is the mechanism... how do the interests and the messages align?

mystery to me, but i guess guess... maybe... the leadership... sucked...

[lakedaemonian]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

wow. cannot possibly agree more.

americans can no longer live on 1 salary due to inflation, so the women's liberation movement is hijacked into a movement to make women feel like losers if they instead of building a 'career' focus on running the household.

the mystery is the mechanism... how do the interests and the messages align?

In regards to Feminism, I think it was quite easy.

Government WINS by hiding inflation behind a thin vaneer of Feminism requiring women to work a second full-time job, and like it, to hide declining living standards....at little to no cost.

Industry WINS by being incentivized to market to an entire new consumer class, full-time working mothers, who, after contributing to the cost of propping up their existing lifestyle, possess some new cashflow to spend with industry.

Feminists WIN via the declaration of false victory.

Women WIN by achieving "financial freedom" and additional leverage/power within their Family heirachy...at the cost of a doubled work load.

Men WIN via increased family cashflow and diversified income streams at the cost of shared leverage/power within their family heriarchy and increased workload.

The loss to Kids and Society are long-term issues that do not compute with short-term attention span mindsets.

In regards to Global Warming, I think it's a bit harder:

Government WINS by taxing those with potential to seemingly benefit the most from a high inflation environment. Framing these powerful small minorities as "Dirty Sinners" by Populist Spanish Inquisition of the New Religion of Global Warming will make it not just possible, but relatively easy....being able to manage a near-religious movement from behind the curtain..sort of like how special interests manage government.

Industry WINS, well...at least some of it....along the lines of the old joke:

Two campers were hiking in the forest when all of a sudden a bear jumps out of a bush and starts chasing them. Both campers start running for their lives, when one of them stops and starts to put on his running shoes.

His partner says, "What are you doing? You can't outrun a bear!" His friend replies, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you!"

The most agile oligarchs, with the most liquidity, will take all...eventually....

Special Interests would probably be "betting it all on PAC" to ensure they are the last standing.

This message is sponsored by Tyson's Soylent Blue..."It really does taste like chicken!"

Environmental Fundamentalists WIN via the declaration of false victory

Consumers WIN if they are successfully driven to populist frenzy with their prize being the destruction of the Dirty $inner$ and watching their fall to join them in despair, and the sense of belonging they achieve as a parishoner at the New Global Warming Religion with the chance of becoming a Carbon Footprint Imam....all at the mere long-term cost of far higher food/energy controlled by even fewer oligarchs.

I wonder how badly the food pyramid will be "re-imagined" like something out of Orwell's 1984.

"Chocolate rations have been increased from 50 to 25 grams a month! Double Good!"

"Let the evil foreigners choke on our dirty dairy and meat exports! We'll make them pay through the nose!"

Just a thought.....

[peakishmael]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

A question we'd ask is whether the tax is proportionate the social cost?

Source: DOE

Fred, or someone - can you cite the source for the DOE data above?

[metalman]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

In regards to Feminism, I think it was quite easy.

Government WINS by hiding inflation behind a thin vaneer of Feminism requiring women to work a second full-time job, and like it, to hide declining living standards....at little to no cost.

Industry WINS by being incentivized to market to an entire new consumer class, full-time working mothers, who, after contributing to the cost of propping up their existing lifestyle, possess some new cashflow to spend with industry.

Feminists WIN via the declaration of false victory.

Women WIN by achieving "financial freedom" and additional leverage/power within their Family heirachy...at the cost of a doubled work load.

Men WIN via increased family cashflow and diversified income streams at the cost of shared leverage/power within their family heriarchy and increased workload.

The loss to Kids and Society are long-term issues that do not compute with short-term attention span mindsets.

In regards to Global Warming, I think it's a bit harder:

Government WINS by taxing those with potential to seemingly benefit the most from a high inflation environment. Framing these powerful small minorities as "Dirty Sinners" by Populist Spanish Inquisition of the New Religion of Global Warming will make it not just possible, but relatively easy....being able to manage a near-religious movement from behind the curtain..sort of like how special interests manage government.

Industry WINS, well...at least some of it....along the lines of the old joke:

Two campers were hiking in the forest when all of a sudden a bear jumps out of a bush and starts chasing them. Both campers start running for their lives, when one of them stops and starts to put on his running shoes.

His partner says, "What are you doing? You can't outrun a bear!" His friend replies, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you!"

The most agile oligarchs, with the most liquidity, will take all...eventually....

Special Interests would probably be "betting it all on PAC" to ensure they are the last standing.

This message is sponsored by Tyson's Soylent Blue..."It really does taste like chicken!"

Environmental Fundamentalists WIN via the declaration of false victory

Consumers WIN if they are successfully driven to populist frenzy with their prize being the destruction of the Dirty $inner$ and watching their fall to join them in despair, and the sense of belonging they achieve as a parishoner at the New Global Warming Religion with the chance of becoming a Carbon Footprint Imam....all at the mere long-term cost of far higher food/energy controlled by even fewer oligarchs.

I wonder how badly the food pyramid will be "re-imagined" like something out of Orwell's 1984.

"Chocolate rations have been increased from 50 to 25 grams a month! Double Good!"

"Let the evil foreigners choke on our dirty dairy and meat exports! We'll make them pay through the nose!"

Just a thought.....

your vision is as clear as it is dark...

[wayiwalk]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

Lakedaemonian's comments are very insightful.

Here's my current situation:

We've managed to live a frugal life on one salary so far, and reside in one of the top school districts in NJ; I've started a business on the side to help save/pay for college costs, and now, with the tidal wave of inflation and paying for everyone else's needs on the horizon, my wife (we've got 4 school aged children, thankfully, they aren't that flatulent) may need to go back to work.

Hmmmmmm.......

[raja]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

With the current low dairy payouts pushing many less-efficient dairy farms to the edge of the cliff, fart taxation will push many over the edge and destroy a considerable amount of existing primary producing dairy capacity.

I see this as an effort to make taxation palatable along the lines of making a lower standard of living palatable.

Agreed . . . .

If this tax goes into effect, it will increase the cost of meat and dairy products, which will reduce their consumption, and less methane gas will be produced. It's like increasing the gasoline tax to reduce driving.

The issue is whether this cut in peoples' nutritional intake is a fair trade off for the amount of methane reduced . . . and what if any effect this will have on global temperature rise.

Another effect of such a tax is to siphon off the peoples' wealth into the black hole of government, where favored people can steal what they need to maintain their lavish lifestyles. My solution -- don't eat cows, Eat the Rich!

[KGW]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

Yes, this is legit...it from www.cbsatlanta.com; this story should give one perspective of just how far down we are about to fall as a society. - JG

Either you've been down in your hole all this time, or you are channeling Rush Limbaugh. Dude, we are in free fall, and have been for some time. . .

http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=2361
Military-Contracting Waste, Fraud, and Abuse—Just What the Government Wants

By Robert Higgs on Jun 7, 2009 in American History, Budget and Tax Policy, Business, Economics, Fascism, Iraq, Military, Politics, The State, War, corruption
According to a June 7, 2009, Associated Press report,

In its first report to Congress, the Wartime Contracting Commission presents a bleak assessment of how tens of billions of dollars have been spent since 2001. The 111-page report, obtained by The Associated Press, documents poor management, weak oversight, and a failure to learn from past mistakes as recurring themes in wartime contracting.
. . .
The commission cites concerns with [inter alia] a massive support contract known as “LOGCAP” that provides troops with essential services, including housing, meals, mail delivery and laundry. . . . KBR Inc., the primary LOGCAP contractor in Iraq, has been paid nearly $32 billion since 2001. The commission says billions of dollars of that amount ended up wasted due to poorly defined work orders, inadequate oversight and contractor inefficiencies.

KBR’s chairman William P. Utt responded to the allegations by saying, more or less, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” According to the AP report, his exact words were: “As we look back on what we’ve done, we’re real proud . . . .” You can bank on his pride in what the company has accomplished, all right. Raking in $32 billion in less than a decade for providing workaday services to the U.S. troops in Iraq is no mean achievement, as contractor rip-offs go.
Many readers will interpret this latest news item as evidence of the government’s “failed policies” for managing the Iraq war, but this interpretation is completely wrong. There are no failed government policies — at least, none that last very long. The government is accomplishing exactly what it seeks to accomplish. If it were not doing so, it would soon change the policies to bring them into accord with its aims.
If you doubt my claim, you may wish to consider that these very “failed policies” in military contracting have remained business as usual ever since World War II, when the modern military-industrial-congressional complex (the MICC) came into being. They have been the subject of countless investigations and several major studies throughout that span of nearly seventy-years. Each study finds basically the same thing; each makes similar proposals to fix the system; but the government never alters the system’s basic workings.
In Arms, Politics, and the Economy, a book edited by me and published by Holmes & Meier in cooperation with The Independent Institute in 1990, William E. Kovacic presents a detailed account of three “blue-ribbon commissions” created to study military contracting and related matters: the 1955 Hoover Commission Task Force, the 1970 Fitzhugh Commission, and the 1986 Packard Commission. Kovacic concludes: “As judged by most who have studied postwar movements to reform the weapons acquisition process, blue ribbon commissions have elicited little basic change in the way the United States buys armaments. . . . Experience with the postwar blue ribbon commissions demonstrates that the inspiration to reform without the commitment to persevere yields little change.”
I am willing to say bluntly what Kovacic never quite concludes in plain language: Nothing changes fundamentally because the investigations are all for show, to give the public the impression that the government is not simply shoveling the taxpayers’ money heedlessly into the contractors’ bank accounts, but none of the leading actors in the MICC—not the military services or the Department of Defense, not the private contractors, not the congressional appropriations and oversight committees—really wants to change the system because, as it now stands, it is serving their interests magnificently.
As the legendary defense analyst Ernest Fitzgerald once said to me, “A defense contract is just a license to steal.” And who wouldn’t want to have such a license? You can bet that KBR enjoys having one, as do Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and the rest of the major licensees. Indeed, it appears that the U.S. military-contracting system constitutes one of the most successful organized-crime rackets in the history of the world.




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You are talking about small stuff, my man. Stuff designed to deflect attention from what matters.

[Slimprofits]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

Legitimate Feminism gets hijacked to obscure increasing inflation and a declining standard of living by making Mom and Family somehow LOVE Mom not just having a full time job at home raising the kids, but a full time job out in the workforce as a "career woman" just to maintain the same standard of living with a few more bits of crap.....you go girl! My Mom's better than yours because she's got three jobs!

wow. cannot possibly agree more.

americans can no longer live on 1 salary due to inflation, so the women's liberation movement is hijacked into a movement to make women feel like losers if they instead of building a 'career' focus on running the household.

lakedaemonian nailed it to the wall.

But even the dramatic rise of maternal employment seems to have preceded feminist values. "On the threshold of adulthood in the late 1960s and early 1970s, baby-boom women imagined they would lead lives very similar to those their mothers led." In 1969, a majority of college women expected to quit work when their first child was born and not return until the youngest was grown. As late as 1970, 78 percent of married women under age forty-five said that it was better for wives to be homemakers and husbands to do the breadwinning. It was largely economics rather than feminism that led these women to violate their own expectations and eventually to reorder their values: For many, Van Horn argues, "work begun as an opportunity soon became an economic necessity as cohort effects intensified and the economy changed." Inflation in the 1970s made two incomes especially essential for families who wished to buy a house, so that mothers of young children had the strongest incentives to work.

[..]

By the mid-1970s the inflation rate exceeded the average income gain for Americans, and by the end of 1970s, two wages were necessary for families to maintain any continued improvement in real income.

The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap
By Stephanie Coontz

http://books.google.com/books?id=DTqj0OPRSkUC

[Master Shake]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

One should be allowed to pass off all externalities to third parties without compensation. Wonderful idea, that.

I doubt that you ever met a government program or tax you didn't like.

We should start fining everyone who pees in the ocean, too. That has the same effect on the ocean as man (or cows) does on the climate.

[wayiwalk]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

............

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You are talking about small stuff, my man. Stuff designed to deflect attention from what matters.

Having worked in my career in defense, and now working in a sector that enjoys gov't contracts and at the very opposite of the political spectrum (protecting the environment), I can say that the waste is here as well, maybe to a larger degree.

At least in defense, you may get something (ie, a widget). Here, you get a report.

Can't comment on fraud because the only cases I saw at the defense company I worked at were actually prosecuted, and the gov't got its money back.

Bottom line - It has everything to do with what happens when you're spending OPM....and that's what's driving everything with the freefall.

Spending of OPM is out of control (since the mid sixties), and each decade, the federal gov't has taken steps to cover it up ( get off the gold standard), push the problem off to the future ( print money ), or create a committee to study the problem and blame it on others from an opposing party within the gov't.

To use KGWs comment as a starting point and take it a step further - You're part of the problem if you are blaming one party or the other. Think about that.

[WDCRob]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

lol... should have known to look at the reality before responding.

Like most right-wing fulminating, the premise of this thread is 100% fiction - it never happened.

The money quote:

"The lengthy ANPR was not a proposed regulation but a preliminary notice seeking informed comments from affected parties on what the impacts of such a comprehensive regulatory approach might be." Nowhere in the long document is any call for a fee or a tax on livestock or the methane they naturally produce.

The Farm Bureau's document argues that if EPA goes ahead with a broad program to limit greenhouse gases, "[i]t is likely that methane, a GHG [greenhouse gas] associated with livestock production, would also be regulated in some form." It further calculates that this possibility could lead to a per-animal tax or fee of $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 for each head of beef cattle and $21.87 for each hog. The Farm Bureau said, "[W]hile some claim a cow ‘tax’ or ‘fee’ is hypothetical or speculative, that does not make the possible outcome any less real." But real or not, it was the Farm Bureau that raised the notion of a tax and calculated the hypothetical fees, and not the EPA.

EPA issued a statement saying it isn't proposing a tax and doesn't have legal authority to impose one anyway...

[jimmygu3]

Re: EPA Weighs Farting Cow Tax

(we've got 4 school aged children, thankfully, they aren't that flatulent)

LOL. Keep 'em off Cracklin' Oat Bran, then.