Sin taxes

#里茲螞蟻批判性思考寫作專欄 #Alex專欄 #外師每週精選閱讀 
 
Death and taxes – the only two unavoidable elements of human life – are closely tied in this week’s article about levying a ‘sin tax’ on meat. This is a follow-up to the news about lab-grown meat starting to enter production, and the related issue of whether or not meat should be considered a harmful luxury item and taxed accordingly. If you have never even considered the possibility of taxing meat consumption before, you should think carefully about the parallels with other unhealthy luxury substances that are drawn in this article.

Alcohol, nicotine and even sugary drinks are all taxed now in many countries around the world, mostly in acknowledgement of the extremely detrimental effects that they all have on public health. Examined from the aspect of health costs alone, and simply focusing on the immense burdens that consumption of these substances puts on society in the form of increased incidences of a huge spectrum of health problems including cancers, cardiovascular disease and obesity, it is only logical and reasonable for governments to tax the sale of them. They can then use the revenue collected from these taxes to offset some of the massive costs to the healthcare systems that need to treat the people who consume these harmful luxuries. After all, it should be the people who, for their own pleasure, deliberately choose to disregard the warnings from the unequivocal consensus of medical science that should shoulder the majority of the burden of the problems that they directly cause. In this sense, taxing the harms caused by the consumption of meat is no different.

As the researchers quoted in this article state, consumption of meat, whether it be processed or red meat, also directly leads to comparable health problems and costs to society, and thus it should also be taxed to recoup some of the costs to healthcare systems. To add even stronger support to the argument in favour of imposing a meat tax is the added benefit that less meat would be eaten as a result, and this would potentially decrease emissions of greenhouse gases by at least a hundred million tonnes every year; not to mention the immeasurable benefits to be gained from saving rainforests and reclaiming pastureland devastated by intensive livestock farming. In other words, there would be a multitude of advantages to levying such a tax.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/06/taxing-red-meat-would-save-many-lives-research-shows
 
===我是分隔線===
 
💡這個專欄目的是訓練同學聰明閱讀。
 
上面的貼文內容是我們的實力派外師Alex，針對每週一篇英文文章閱讀後，親自寫出的批判性思考文（不是copy & paste的東西啊）。旨在讓同學知道如何用不同的角度來讀文章。你可以選擇先讀Alex寫的批判文，也可以選擇先讀本次的英文文章連結，但最好兩處都要閱讀才能達到最好的效果。
 
這是個訓練批判性思考的好機會，希望同學不要被文字牽著鼻子走，在閱讀時可以多思考。大家可以善用這個寶貴的資源～
 
舊文連結：
https://www.leedsmayi.com/alex-column
 
Alex是我們的御用老師，每週都會幫梅姨、托托、慕華上英文課。目前星期一晚上有開一班 #里茲螞蟻外師應用英文課程 ，程度高級，充滿知識性與深度。有開放單次付費上課。若你想學習用英文來深度探討各項主題，check it out！
 
Alex老師的應用英文課：
https://www.leedsmayi.com/applied-english.html