I've mentioned this before

but it is making the news yet again --- you think your food prices are high now?? wait until these prices get put into the mix:

EPA 'Cow Tax' Could Charge $175 per Dairy Cow to Curb Greenhouse Gases:

"“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.”"

Okay so this means that MOST farms in WI & MN will be hit (they are mostly beef or dairy if they have cows in MN... in WI they are mostly dairy).

Basically these 'permits' are CO-credits like they sell to businesses.

So here are a couple of observations:

1. Family farms which are struggling to keep afloat now, will find it 500times harder with this 'permit' .... because before they can ever operate they will have to buy the permits - if they are already in debt, well there goes the farm because they will suddenly be faced with $17,000+ for a dairy farm (100 head of milkers is not unusual) or more if you have beef cattle or piggies (few farms that are in the business are going to have LESS than 1000 head each) ...
but then I suppose if you suddenly have a bunch of foreclosed farms you can turn them into low-rent housing complexes ....

2. These fees will be passed onto the consumers who will be suddenly find that meals will be too expensive, school districts will find that milk prices will be outrageous (remember school lunches for lower income families are mandatory, but districts only get a portion of the funding needed to pay for it from the feds, the rest comes from states, taxes and the other kids who will stop buying school lunch because it will be too expensive to do so), states such as TX, MT, WI, MN, IA will be the ones hurt the most by this new tax-in-disguise.

3. seems to me that if these animals are causing "Global Warming" then the best thing we could do is eat them -- so why make them so hard to buy? Seems to me that they would want people to do all they can to deminish the population.

4. this is only a temporary solution, because like the 'cigarette tax' which taxes cigarettes extra to pay for insurance programs ... if there aren't as many people, or in this case livestock, to tax then the revenue they are counting on from the tax won't be there.

5. you can pretty much count on a change in the American diet to meats that won't be taxed so highly .... such as horse, deer, fowl, chicken, dog, cat, squirrel, etc. Yes we will become a "road kill cuisine" nation. I'm sorry but its true.

6. more people who have not received adequate skills will be getting hunting lisc. to put meat on the table -- good for the butchers who do the processing, although they are becoming fewer and fewer, which will find more work than they can handle outside of 'deer' and 'duck' seasons .... and they will find that there will be more people doing home-processing of meat in areas not zoned for such things leading to improperly gutted animals which will contaminate the meat and thus giving people more cases of such ailments as eColi and Salmonella.

I think they didn't think this one thru .... they are counting on the 'gas' mentality of people - the condition where like when gas prices started going up and people still bought it until it got near $5/gal .... I think they are hoping that people will still buy meat until such time as it gets up to $5/lb for hamburger - only thing is - people are so strapped that it will take less than that for people to stop buying.

oh.....

I wonder if PETA isn't behind all this .... hmmm