Wednesday 22 June 2011

Breathing tax

Wherever you stand on the issue of anthropogenic global warming, it has to be admitted that the argument has generated some laughably stupid suggestions. 

Perhaps one of the stupidest comes from an Australian academic, Prof Barry Walters, who wants to impose a carbon tax on babies. This has to be the ultimate in taxation, a tax on breathing, a tax on simply existing.

And what exactly does Prof Walters think you could do about people who refuse to pay, as I think most would. You can’t exactly put a baby back where it came from now can you?

An Australian lady with, I suspect, a far less academic background has described Prof Walters as “a self important professor with silly ideas”. Spot on, although somewhat more restrained and polite than I would expect from an Ausie.

3 comments:

  1. Of course, given that there are multiple ways of taxing you after you are dead, they've got the Afterlife / decomposition / recycling phase covered too.

    Which only leaves pre-birth as a place to expand the taxation concept to. Say a tax on pregnancies... or on wombs?

    Or perhaps a tax on the mere idea of procreating?

    After al, the latter would be a way of taxing rude thoughts, surely something many politicians must dream of.

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  2. Did not one of the Carry On films have a SET (Sex Enjoyment Tax)?

    Given that all the panting and physical activity involved in procreation, the drive to the restaurant and then the motel, cooked meal, imported wine and candles as precusers and the post coital cigarette all consume carbon might not the "learned" professor have a point?

    Not quite sure what the point was.

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  3. Restaurant? Motel? Wine? Candles? Panting? This sounds more like a mistress than a wife.

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