Thursday, November 10, 2011

Merry Christmas

When journalists discovered yesterday that the Federal Registry included a new 15-cent tax on fresh Christmas trees, they cried "War on Christmas!" and accused President Obama of trying to destroy American traditions. This was fairly silly, of course, but no more silly than the tax itself.

The administration was never trying to destroy Christmas. (It suspended the fee this afternoon.) In fact, it was trying to save Christmas -- for the Christmas tree lobby. The fee was requested by the National Christmas Tree Association to pay for a new marketing campaign to save itself from further collapse.

Fresh-tree sales fell by 16 percent in 16 years to 31 million in 2007. A 2004 article on the crisis in fresh trees reported that in 1990, roughly equal numbers of households put up real trees and fake trees -- about 35 million each. "A decade later, the split was 32 million live and 50.6 million artificial," they said. (If anybody's "killing Christmas" by letting pine trunks rot in parking lots, it's Christian families and their fake Christmas trees.)

As Ronald Reagan once said, if you see business move, you tax it. If it continues to move, you regulate it. When it quits moving, you subsidize it.

Thanks reader Jeremy for the tip.

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