We want to tax you and use it to shame you
So, now the environmental extremists want to tax you, take the money, and berate you parents for letting your kids get fat:
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups are calling for a couch potato sin tax to finance their outdoor classrooms, reportedly to fight childhood obesity. It’s part of a growing “Leave No Child Inside” movement to get kids outside of classrooms and reduce screen time. We want to “tax part of the problem to fund the solution,” a Sierra Club spokesperson told KOB-TV news.
Remember - it's for the children. What scolds - "since you can't take good care of your kids, based on our standards, we'll take your money and spend it our way on them...or is that, for our purposes masked as 'for them'".
It is now a SIN to do what you want to do with your own time and own money for your own children. After all, along with global warming, childhood obesity is the obsession du jour.
An alliance of more than a dozen New Mexico environmental groups will lobby again for legislative approval of a 1 percent sales tax — or “sin tax" — on new televisions and video games to fund outdoor education programs. Such a tax could raise an estimated $4 million a year.... The environmental alliance will ask for a half-million dollars to continue the fledgling Outdoor Classroom program. The Environmental Alliance of New Mexico boasts 30,000 members among its combined groups, which include the Sierra Club, New Mexico Wildlife Federation, Nature Conservancy and 1000 Friends of New Mexico. ...The program works with educators to develop curriculum, provide teaching materials, pay for busing students to the parks and for service-learning grants. A portion of the money also went to the Rural Education Bureau of the Public Education Department. “I would love to see this move forward and get funding. A lot of it needs to be used to train teachers," said Donna Grein, the bureau's education administrator....
Mark my words, this is just an attempt to get more money for THEIR projects for the wilderness; I bet that if strict audit procedures are sprung on them that they would find that not all of this new revenue stream would end up "for the children" (cynical, aren't I).
No, the answer is not more taxes to be given to advocacy groups. The answer is much cheaper - hide the game consoles and kick the kids outside to play.
Why am I flaming on this? I am philosophically opposed to local taxpayer money going to NGO (Non-Governmental Organizations, or Outside Agencies, or Charities - take your pick). Let individuals donate if they so wish - it should not be see as proper to have government forcibly take money from taxpayers and "donate" for non-governmental activities.
Just like the $1.5 million “Kids in the Woods” program proposed by the Forest Service last May, there is no credible evidence for a new “nature deficit disorder” children are claimed to suffer from, or that getting them outside and teaching them about the environment will eradicate childhood obesity or attention deficit disorder.
The unsoundness of this childhood obesity initiative is even more disturbing in that it’s targeting New Mexico, a poor state with one of the lowest rates of childhood obesity in the nation. Instead, according to the New Mexico State Center for Health Statistics, Bureau of Vital Records, 25.9% of children live at or below the poverty level and it leads the nation in food insecurity and hunger. One in six New Mexicans — 16.8% — suffers low or very low food security (the government’s new term for hunger). In fact, according to the 2006 Legislative Health and Human Services Committee, it ranks near the bottom — 48th among the states — for the ten indicators of child well-being, and poverty-related problems are widespread, such as low birth weight, premature births, teen pregnancies, not completing high school, violence-related deaths, alcoholism, and access to health care. Substance abuse and suicide rates among young people are two and half times the national average...
