Is It Time For A Meat Tax?

Charles Kenny makes the case:

The Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that in 2012, 966 million pigs, 1.5 billion cattle, and 22 billion chickens were roaming (actually, mostly not roaming) the world’s farms. For cattle, that’s five times the number in 1890 and for pigs about a tenfold increase, according to Clive Ponting’s Green History of the World. That’s one factor behind the growing global obesity epidemic: a British study comparing meat eaters and vegetarians found average differences in weight between meat eaters and vegans of 5.9 kilograms in men and 4.7 kilograms in women—and a recent U.S. study also suggested that meat consumption was positively linked to obesity. …

Yet despite all the reasons for curbing meat consumption, livestock farmers got nearly a third of a billion dollars in subsidies in 2011 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Let’s smash that pork…