Meatonomics (29 page)

Consider the benefits. The Meat Tax and other proposed changes would reduce US consumption of animal foods by about 44 percent.
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Further, the tax credit would help ensure that those who consume meat, eggs, fish, and dairy at the lower levels driven by the tax have enough extra cash both to pay for those goods and to pay the tax. Most important, the shift in consumption would help Americans in dozens of ways—some economic, and some that go beyond mere dollars. Assuming that cutting consumption results in pro rata declines both in production and in the problems that production and consumption cause, we can expect results like these:

• 172,000 fewer annual deaths from cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.
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• 26 billion fewer land and marine animals (eighty-five fewer animals per American) killed each year.
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• A 3.4 trillion-pound annual reduction in the emission of carbon dioxide equivalents.
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  (That's like garaging, each year the tax proposal is in effect, all 250 million registered highway vehicles
  and
  all twelve million motor boats and ships in the United States.)
  
• 440 billion pounds less hazardous waste generated yearly and available to enter American soil or water.
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• 708,000 square miles of US land no longer devoted to raising livestock or feed crops. (Subtracting the fraction of this land necessary to grow plants instead of animal foods leaves 566,000 square miles—an area twice the size of Texas.
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  In other words, one-sixth of the contiguous United States would no longer be needed for agriculture and could be returned to forest, grassland, or other native habitat.)
  
• $26 billion in annual savings to Medicare and Medicaid programs.
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• Annual decline of $184 billion in animal foods' external costs imposed on Americans.
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• Yearly cash surplus of $32 billion in the US Treasury.
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How would we spend such a huge annual cash surplus? Here's one idea: help fund a change in business model for farmers who raise animals or feed crops. Congress did just that for the tobacco industry in 2004 when, in conjunction with halting price supports, no-recourse loans, and other federal subsidies to tobacco growers, it set up the $10 billion Tobacco Transition Payment Program. Tobacco-growing states offered their own buyout programs as well, and thousands of tobacco farmers were able to transition to new crops. We might also use some of the surplus cash to create a permanent fund to clean up soil and water damaged by animal agriculture. Or to support organic farmers, provide Americans with better nutrition education, or pay down some of the national debt.

Is it too good to be true? As economist Thomas Sowell notes, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Policy changes invariably come with strings attached, and the Meat Tax is no exception. Consider some of the trade-offs and critiques.

In fact, meatonomics already drives overconsumption and health problems that unfairly hurt the poor. For example, one cohort study finds that Americans in the lowest income group are consistently more overweight than those in the highest income group.
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Another finds that low income is associated with a higher prevalence of diabetes.
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Animal foods aren't the sole source of these health problems, but as we saw in
chapter 6
, they're a significant contributing cause. And by shifting demand among the poor away from animal foods and toward healthier protein sources, the Meat Tax will help ameliorate some of the health disparity between socioeconomic groups. Also, as noted,
the proposal keeps food stamp program spending at current levels, and the $32 billion cash surplus it generates can provide additional assistance to low-income Americans.

Is it? The proposed demand cut seeks to return Americans' per capita meat consumption to its level in 1940, before the meteoric rise of fast food and factory farms—and before consumer demand for animal foods doubled. The incidence of diabetes was then one-eighth of today's level, and the obesity rate was one-third what it is now. Is it extreme to return to healthier consumption levels? In the documentary
Forks over Knives
, heart surgeon Caldwell Esselstyn responds to the argument that shifting consumption away from animal foods and toward plants is extreme. “Half a million people a year will have their chests opened up and a vein taken from their leg and sewn onto their coronary artery,” notes Esselstyn. “Some people would call that ‘extreme’.”

Some may argue the Meat Tax does not go far enough to end the abuse of animals used for food—or that it merely preserves an inhumane status quo. For example, law professor Gary Francione has argued that those concerned for the well-being of animals must reject “new-welfarist” measures—halfway steps that purport to help animals but in fact provide little real benefit. According to Francione, such measures fail because they (1) support and validate the existing system, (2) cause little change in consumer behavior, (3) increase profits to producers, thereby encouraging further animal abuse, and (4) have little measurable, empirical effect on animal welfare.
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However, these objections do not apply to the Meat Tax.

On the contrary, the proposed tax: (1) does
not
support the status quo—rather, it seeks to dismantle and repurpose nearly half of the animal food production system to plant-based foods; (2) would cause a massive change in consumer behavior, namely, a 44 percent drop in consumption of animal foods; (3) would significantly reduce animal
food producers' viability, forcing many to exit the business; and (4) would have a major, measurable effect on animal welfare by saving the lives of 26 billion land and marine animals yearly. Unlike the new-welfarist measures that Francione and others reject, this proposal will achieve major changes to the existing system and tangible, significant benefits for animals.

If producers want to reduce or eliminate a tax's effect on demand, they can internalize the tax by lowering their prices. The result is that consumption stays constant but producer profits decrease. That might work with a modest tax, but for an industry already struggling to raise pigs and cattle worth less than their production cost, and now faced with the loss of subsidies, internalizing a 50 percent tax would be impossible. Further, even if producers found a way to internalize a significant part of the Meat Tax—say, lowering prices by 10 percent, the tax and other proposed changes would still achieve most of their intended effects (including generating a projected $20 billion cash surplus for the US Treasury).

That wouldn't work for the tax's main goal: to discourage consumption. A single-digit tax would simply legitimize current consumption levels and the damage they cause, and it would do little to lower those levels. Further, a tax that low might let producers internalize all or most of the price increase by lowering their prices, which would further weaken the tax's effect.

The tax doesn't seek to reduce overall spending, just to shift some spending from animal foods to other foods. It's not a diet, and there's no reason consumers won't continue to devour the same number of
calories they did previously—albeit from healthier sources—which means buying substitute foods. Further, the tax credit to individual taxpayers provides a cash boost and a significant source of stimulus funding. So there's no reason why the tax should cause an overall reduction in spending.

It's true that a Meat Tax will cause some job loss in animal agriculture. But there are several mitigating factors. For one thing, people will continue to eat—just different foods. The size of the employment pie doesn't need to change, even if it gets sliced up differently. In other words, the jobs sacrificed in meat, fish, eggs, and dairy will be offset by new ones in sectors that raise crops for humans (rather than for livestock) or that manufacture plant-based foods. These sectors will also need additional inputs like seeds, equipment, and transportation, all of which will see job growth or replacement as a result.

In fact, if you had a job in animal food production, you might be
glad
to change it. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that personnel in slaughterhouses and milk production are more than twice as likely as the rest of the working population to suffer a workplace injury.
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A
New York Times
article found Smithfield pork slaughterhouse workers performing painful and repetitive tasks for $10.24 an hour (in current dollars).
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Further, racism is rampant in slaughterhouses, not only in self-segregating cafeterias and locker rooms, but in the way the work is doled out: whites get the best jobs (supervising or mechanic work), followed by Native Americans (warehouse work), then blacks (kill floor), with Mexicans (butchering) at the bottom.
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But for workers in the animal food system, injuries and racism are just the beginning. In their 2010 book
Food Justice
, Robert Gottleib and Anupama Joshi detail a slew of injustices faced by laborers in American agricultural sectors like fishing and meat processing.
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Ninety percent of agriculture workers lack health insurance. One-third are undocumented. One-quarter live in conditions that one state agency called “extremely overcrowded.” As a result of such odious
work conditions, the Smithfield plant profiled in the
New York Times
article experienced 100 percent annual turnover; each year, five thousand workers quit and five thousand new workers are hired.

It's true that a Meat Tax will put some animal food producers out of business. But to some extent, particularly for factory farm operators, isn't that the goal? We've seen that the problems of meatonomics are supply driven, or spurred by producers. These animal agribusinesses are responsible for offloading more costs onto American society than any other industry. We've seen that animal food producers routinely seek to deceive us about their products' health effects and their treatment of animals. Must Americans continue to prop up factory farmers and fishers at the expense of so much that's wrong with their industries, merely because of the argument that they help the US economy? In fact, we've seen in this chapter that eliminating half of their business will actually
help
the economy in a big way.

Despite their protestations, disfavored industries are regularly targeted by social movements that seek to curb or eliminate them. When Britain sought to ban the slave trade in the 19th century, staunch opposition came from the city whose ships carried more than half of Europe's slaves—Liverpool. Liverpudlians wrote a song that began, “If our slave trade be gone, there's an end to our lives, Beggars all we must be, our children and wives.”
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Similar sentiments were expressed in the United States, where Thomas Dew, the future president of the College of William and Mary, wrote in 1832, “It is in truth the slave labor in Virginia which gives value to her soil and her habitations—take away this and . . . the Old Dominion will be a ‘vast howling wilderness’—the grass shall be seen growing in the streets, and the foxes peeping from their holes.”
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Unfortunately, sometimes social and economic progress means temporary discomfort for a few.

Americans like the right to do as we please, and we don't want government telling us what to eat. Is the Meat Tax too paternalistic? To look at it another way, does the tax diminish individual choice in much the same way that the existing system does? Consider one of the simplest
definitions of, and objections to, paternalism, by the philosopher John Stuart Mill:

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.
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Certainly, on one level, the Meat Tax does seek to change people's behavior for their own good. But on another, and perhaps more important level, the tax seeks to prevent harm to others as Mill contemplated. Some of the others routinely harmed by American animal food production practices, whom this proposal would in some measure protect, include:

• Farmers in developing nations who are hurt by our subsidies and dumping practices.
  
• Residents of Asia and South America, where most of our fish is caught or grown, whose local ecosystems are routinely compromised for our dining pleasure.
  
• Future generations of Americans who must someday pay the deferred, externalized costs of producing animal foods today.
  
• 16 million Americans who consume little or no animal foods yet still incur the industry's massive externalized costs.
  
• 60 billion land and marine animals killed yearly to feed Americans, and billions more marine animals killed as bycatch—including millions of endangered animals like albatross and sea turtles.
  
• Millions of US bee colonies destroyed by pesticides and reduced foraging opportunities resulting from monocrop planting—most of which involves feed crops.
  
• Thousands of environmental features like lakes and rivers polluted by animal waste, which some scholars believe have, or should have, independent legal rights.
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