This Is Vegan Propaganda (& Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You)

by Ed Winters

Through our taxes, we are in essence funding the animal cruelty, human exploitation, environmental degradation and disease creation that we should all want to bring to an end. Then, to add insult to injury, we are paying for the healthcare costs, the environmental clean-up costs and the pandemic costs that come about as a result of what we do to animals. It is a truly absurd, scandalous and immoral use of public funds – tax revenues are meant to be spent on improving society, not degrading and destroying it. We have the money; it just needs to be distributed in a fair and logical manner. We should also tax animal products to reflect their true cost to society. Research has shown that there would need to be a 20 per cent tax on unprocessed meat and a 110 per cent tax on processed meat in high-income nations just to cover the healthcare costs incurred by the consumption of animal flesh.6 Doing so would also cut annual deaths by 220,000 and save £130 billion a year. Another piece of research calculated that in the EU meat prices would have to rise by 40 per cent, organic meat prices would have to rise by 25 per cent and milk prices would have to rise by around 30 per cent to cover the environmental costs associated with their production.7 In the same way that we have taxes on harmful products such as sugar, alcohol and tobacco, it makes logical and financial sense that the same be done for animal products. Why are we spending billions on these industries when doing so is caus...