Would you support a “meat tax.”

Found this article that discusses rather or not there should be a meat tax. The purpose of such a tax would be to increase the price of meat as an incentive for people to eat less meat, similar to how they have done with cigarettes.

For those who don’t want to read the article here’s a quick summary:

• it sometimes becomes necessary “to lay taxes for the purpose of providing for the general welfare.”

• Would be considered a “behavioral tax” (I.e.a tax intended “to nudge people to achieve social ends”). The perfect example of this is what the US has done with cigarettes.

• high meat consumption contributes to the global epidemic of obesity, cancer, and antibiotic resistance

• Livestock has been estimated to account for around 15 percent of human-related greenhouse gases

• animal agriculture is water-intensive and space-inefficient

• eliminating animal protein from the global food system would save $1.6 trillion in environmental costs by 2050.

For those interested in the article here are some screenshots:

If you want to find the article yourself, it is titled

“Here Comes the Meat Tax”

and found on theatlantic.com