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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

This is a perfect example of why "sin taxes" like the proposed tax on meat[1][2] to fight climate change are a bad idea.

You need to tax the externality (greenhouse gas emissions), not an activity which currently causes such emissions, because then you don't have any incentives left (such as in this case) for industries to reduce those emissions.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/meat-tax...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_tax

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Of course the remaining sin being treating animals like a commodity, making them suffer, driving them around in crowded conditions for hundreds of miles...

It‘s not just the environment that suffers from our industrialized way to produce meat

That's another good example. Tax that, and you create an incentive to either eat "dumber" meat like fish instead of pigs, or meat where you've avoided the "sin" altogether. Such as lab-grown meat.

So, why would that be a negative outcome?

It's not - I think OP is saying tax the animal suffering, not the eating of meat generally.

I feel the same way about vegetables. Cutting down in the prime of their life, and shipping them to stores across the country packed in crates. It's unconscionable.

Vegetables are not conscious, and they cannot feel and interpret pain.

Taking your logic, I can extend your argument in the opposite direction towards humans. But I have a feeling no one would condone that!

That gets a bit more complicated though, greenhouse gas emissions through burping is just one of the many impacts cattle have on the planet: land usage, water usage, manure (harms water supplies, runoff, release gasses, etc), and then you have the knock-on impacts of all the feed that needs to be produced to feed them.

Your point is correct, but you can apply it in the other direction; adding a sin tax also has knock-on effects and often produce unexpected market distortions.

I think your point just argues for pricing in more externalities, rather than abandoning the goal of pricing them and using even more opaque sin taxes instead.

True but I think some of these issues are also fundamentally harder to tax. Everything uses land and water, the problem is how much cattle use per calorie produced.

I suppose you're saying we should tax usage of these things based on calorie produced?

Nothing needs to be taxed based on calorie produced. For the purposes of sustainability you tax externalities. Whether that's releasing carbon into the atmosphere, or whatever it costs to fix the land or water you're polluting.

If you're polluting as much as your neighbor but producing fewer calories you'll make less money, so market forces will take care of that and you'll be more likely to go out of business. There's no need to tax anything based on caloric production for the purposes of taxing pollution.

That of course assumes that you're producing the same product as your neighbor, but maybe he's making dogfood and you're making Kobe beef. Then it's OK for your business if you're producing fewer calories per unit of pollution.

Right, my point is that producing any type of meat consumes excessive amounts of land vs other forms of producing food, I guess what I'm asking is: how do you classify 'land' as an externality?

With per-acre property taxes. If you need 10x the land to produce a kg of beef v.s. a kg of lentils you'll pay 10x the property taxes, which'll be worked into the price of your product.

The question of e.g. water consumption or pollution is a separate question. It's possible to pollute a lot in a very small area, and that should be priced accordingly.

Fair enough, I see the logic behind what you're saying, but taxing that as an externality would require a massive change in the way farmland is managed and taxed in most of the western world.

I'm not saying this is right, but farming is such a difficult and low-margin occupation that most countries have policies of helping farmers and having low to no taxes (even to the point of giving cashback in the EU) on land classified as "farmland"

So "sin taxes" would be a way of targeting some of the biggest problems (meat) without completely restructuring the food and taxation system around the world.

The "sin taxes" would just be another and less efficient form of restructuring. You'd reduce meat consumption, thus screwing over some polluting farmers, but also equally screwing over other farmers who pollute less to produce the same product.

But on the topic of say EU farming subsidies: You'd still raise the taxes dramatically to price the externality of pollution, but could just on top of that decide to give tax rebates that would amount to the same net subsidy.

The reason it's important to do it that way is two-fold.:

First you want to as a matter of public policy see how much you're actually paying for this subsidy. E.g. corporations in the EU usually pay a reduced VAT rate via rebates, we don't pretend that the concept of VAT doesn't apply to them. We could see that we like farming so much that we're spending however many billions of EUR/yr on offloading pollution on future generations.

Secondly because such a tax subsidy could be structured to give more money to farmers if they pollute less, instead of them coming out even if they continue doing what they're doing now. Right now a farmer who releases way more CO^2 than his neighbor doesn't pay any more taxes, maybe you'd like to keep it that way for political reasons, but we could at least structure it so that his neighbor makes money by polluting less.

I agree with what avar is saying above and in the sibling thread.

> producing any type of meat consumes excessive amounts of land vs other forms of producing food

I think this is quite different from CO2 and pollution, which I'd agree are true externalities. I'm not sure I follow " how do you classify 'land' as an externality" though. Why is it an externality? It is a good that has a price.

It sounds like you're believe that there's something inherently bad about meat consuming more land to produce than other types of food. But I think to first approximation, the free market just sorts that one out; if there were other uses for that land that were more profitable on a per-acre basis, then you'd expect land-owners to convert to those uses.

This was ops point, if you tax the emissions only people can innovate and reduce emissions in all these areas to the same effect.

But how do you tax the potential land usage? Are you saying we should tax farmers based on how many acres it takes them to produce a calorie?

This could also have a knock-on affect of encouraging _more_ cruelty (if that's even possible at this point).

I think we should tax them based on emissions which includes deforestation / clearing yes. Separately I would definitely like to see animals regulated with X land per animal like free range chickens are regulated. Given the current state of pig farming I don’t think we can physically go worse than status quo.

I understand “tax emission” has many edge cases and will be tough to nut out without a general rule being possible, but it’s really important the cost of polluting is actually paid for with dollars and this is what we pay politicians to do every day (despite what it looks like).

Great point about taxing the externalities. Also, I think that elected officials with the livestock facilities in their jurisdictions should be required to live (or spend a significant amount of time) downwind of the facilities.

Some externalities are hard to tax. For example, consumption of red meat probably increases cancer risk [1]. We can't introduce a tax on cancer, but we still want to reduce the occurrence of cancer, so all that's left is taxing red meat.

[1]: http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/

What about letting people make their own choices without trying to social engineer them, which is essentially forcing our values onto them?

"But temperance also can be created by coercion. Taxing is a good coercive device. To keep downtown shoppers temperate in their use of parking space we introduce parking meters for short periods, and traffic fines for longer ones. We need not actually forbid a citizen to park as long as he wants to; we need merely make it increasingly expensive for him to do so. Not prohibition, but carefully biased options are what we offer him. A Madison Avenue man might call this persuasion; I prefer the greater candor of the word coercion."

-- The Tragedy of the Commons

I recommend the whole paper as a good think on the unintended consequences of not biasing the options of people away from collective irresponsibility.

Because their choices have consequences for others.

You might not care about some health risk, but when you get sick, your family is going to be affected, your coworkers are going to be affected, and society has to pay for you to get well (by paying more for health insurance).

And we're social animals. We care about one another. And caring sometimes means that we nudge people into a direction that makes them healthier.

(I don't actually know if red meat is dangerous enough to justify a tax, but for the sake of argument, let's assume it is)

Why not tax cancer? If I eat red meat and don’t get cancer, then why am I paying an extra tax? It isn’t like my red meat consumption is causing other people to get cancer.

First of all you can tax cancer, you make people who engage in voluntary cancer-inducing activities such as smoking pay higher health care costs.

But secondly that WHO page is frequently cited by people who apparently haven't understood the numbers behind it. It's not worthwhile to tax meat as a cancer risk because the health impact is a rounding error.

According to the WHO:

> about 34 000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meat.

That's the population of a village worldwide. To turn that into a death rate for the world population in 2015 is 34000/7400000000*100000 = 0.45.

That wouldn't even make it onto this table[1] of most common worldwide death rates. You can see rates like 15 for diabetes, and 115 for heart disease, both of which are strongly linked to diet.

If everyone in the world adjusted their diet so they wouldn't be overweight or obese, but kept eating processed red meat, then diet-related illnesses would be rare enough that nobody would even bother talking about them, as opposed to being the one of the leading causes of death in the western world.

Citing a WHO report which says that evidence of carcinogenicity is strong without context is correct but misleading. As that page points out you can have strong evidence but tiny effect sizes.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...

That red meat is carcinogenic was just an example for illustrating my point that externalities are hard /impossible to tax.

I could just as well have said that red meat increases risk of heart attacks, red meat increases choleserol, raising cattle for meat uses lots of fresh water in areas that don't have enough, that a lot of feed is required to produce very little meat...

It just happens that one externality (methane emissions) is easily measured, but all the other externalities of meat consumption are not, hence a tax makes sense.

You're right that it's impossible at the micro-level, but things don't need to be taxed down to that level.

E.g. are we going to tax farmer John more than farmer Bob because John feels he needs to smoke cigarettes while farming (and thus makes some small extra contribution to CO^2 emissions), no. Measuring things at that level would be silly.

But it's easy enough to get sufficiently right for the purposes of discouraging externalities and encouraging innovation. Farms, power plants, cargo ships etc. are all major contributors to pollution, and the taxes they pay can be calculated as a function of regular inspections, which all those industries need to undergo anyway.

What? We most certainly can introduce a tax on cancer. Don't you know anything about US health care? We can make cancer in remission a pre-existing condition, and make those who have it practically uninsurable, so that their next major health-impacting event bankrupts them, or kills them, or both.

If someone with cancer dies, their cancer also dies. Net result: less cancer. (Unless it is important to research, such as HeLa. In that case, the cancer can go on living with all expenses paid, and the human it came from can be forgotten, and their estate uncompensated.)

~ (Poe's law: insincere.)

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