
Chicken tax - laktak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
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J-dawg
> _Largely because of post-World War II intensive chicken farming and
> accompanying price reductions, chicken, once internationally synonymous with
> luxury, became a staple food in the U.S._

These intensive farming methods basically involve treating chickens as protein
factories with no regard for their welfare. Packing as many of them as
possible into a small space and breeding them to put on weight so quickly that
their legs often can't support their bodies.

I wish more people would face up to the reality that cheap meat is _only_
possible by mistreating animals in quite horrific ways. If we treated chickens
properly, their meat would still be considered an expensive delicacy.

Then again, if you treat animals well it's likely worse for the environment
(more land required for agriculture etc) so there's really no escaping the
fact that humanity needs to eat less meat.

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sleavey
I agree with most of your points, but saying that treating animals well is
worse for the environment is pretty misleading. "Treating animals better"
should include not feeding them growth hormones or pumping them full of
antibiotics which enter the food chain via the meat and ground water. Treating
animals well is good for the environment, and drastically reducing consumption
or not eating them at all is especially good (think of Amazon deforestation to
make way for cattle ranches).

~~~
derefr
The effects of antibiotics entering the water table pale in comparison to 1.
the extra pesticides that enter the water table from growing the extra plant
matter that must be used to feed free-range animals, and 2. the pollution from
the processes required to create the fertilizer to grow said plant matter.

You can think of an animal as a way to convert a whole lot of plant matter
into a little meat. Growing plant matter for feed, itself, pollutes in various
ways. A given animal might be less healthy eating corn than eating grass, but
if it needs to eat 10x the weight in grass in its lifetime... that animal,
raised that way, is now likely responsible for 10x the pollution.

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undersuit
>the extra pesticides that enter the water table from growing the extra plant
matter that must be used to feed free-range animals

1) Why must it be grown? Shouldn't there just be less animals in places that
can't support their grazing?

2) Why are you applying pesticides and fertilizer?

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derefr
You misunderstand the entire concept of modern agriculture, I think:
agriculture is _demand-driven_. People want food, and have money to spend on
food, and so companies (farms) come into existence to turn natural resources
_into_ food, so that they can take that money.

You can't just have there be "less animals", without feeding _less people_
than have the money to pay to be fed—which is effectively impossible without
abandoning capitalism: a new company would always come into existence to
capture that surplus.

Looking at things through a demand-driven lens, #1 and #2 are one-another's
answers: if all the _existing_ companies restrict themselves to non-"enriched"
agriculture, then the market can only support a certain number of those
companies—but there is still demand, so a new company will come into existence
that uses (or one of the existing companies "innovate" to use) pesticides and
fertilizer, to squeeze more feedstock out of the same land, to produce more
meat from a given agricultural base, to answer the unmet demand.

(The _real_ "problem" with this system is that demand isn't fixed; the more
food there is available in an area, the more new _people_ the people in that
area tend to make, creating a positive feedback loop where demand will never
be fully satisfied, necessitating a "race to the bottom" of who can squeeze
their natural resources the hardest. Fix _that_ , rather than abandoning an
allocation system for operating too well.)

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acchow
An excellent episode of Planet Money on this

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/25/511663527/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/25/511663527/episode-632-the-
chicken-tax)

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robertcope
This is why we don't get some of the cool trucks we see elsewhere.

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Marazan
There was also the disgraceful Banana tradewar where arbitrary US tariffs on
cashmere devastated the local economy of the Scottish Borders.

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ethagknight
What prevented any of the big 3 from copying a European or Japanese light
truck design as a means of taking advantage of the tariff? With 3 major
manufacturers in America, Why did small truck and van development totally
stall? If I recall correctly, prior to the arrival of Mercedes' Sprinter, the
Ford Econoline brand of vans, along with their dodge and chevy competitors,
were typically based on truck frame designs a decade or two older.

~~~
linksnapzz
Nothing _prevented_ them; Detroit automakers either had substantial interests
in foreign makers selling light trucks outside North America, or were in some
cases selling small pickups and vans designed by their own foreign divisions.

They simply did not feel that smaller/lighter trucks & vans would be
profitable, or profitable enough. This goes off and on; often one of the
Detroit makes will go years without having an entry in the small truck market.

There are advantages to using a pickup-style perimeter frame to make a van,
that said, unlike Ford & Chevy, the Dodge B-series vans were unitized from the
'70s on.

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yuhong
Thinking about it, if the US economy was still on the gold standard in the
1970s, it probably would have been declined when Japanese cars and other goods
took over and would be very different by now. As a side note, one of the
reason we got off it was government spending, which means as the more money
NSA or Medicare for example spends more money gets printed (by increasing
government debt).

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tmaly
Economics is a big thing if you do not have a background in it, I recommend
the book Economics in One Lesson. It was enlightening.

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galdosdi
The chicken tax used to tick me off. Then I figured out the trick around it:
get a /heavy/ truck instead. The heavy truck market is way better than the
light truck market. It's kind of insane and unfortunately yet another way US
federal regulations (eg CAFE) encourage ineffeciency

