Since it's Friday and we've had a slow week here at the Budget Brigade, I wanted to put up a little light-hearted reading today. Enter this article from The Hill newspaper about an effort by the advocacy group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to give a tax credit to - get this - vegetarians. The logic goes like this. According to researchers at the University of Chicago, becoming a vegetarian would reduce carbon emissions 50 percent more per person than switching to a hybrid car. This certainly seems logical since a recent U.N. report cited the livestock industry as "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global," including global warming. One problem though. Let's suppose you stop eating meat - no more steak dinners at Morton's, sausages on the grill, or chicken burritos at Chipotle. How much will your individual decision in this case actually reduce the level of activity of the livestock sector? How many fewer cows, chickens, pigs, etc, would be slaughtered and shipped around the country? Probably not too many. The estimates of reduction in emissions from this choice is an aggregate number - the average of each meat-eater's contribution to the emissions of an entire industry - not the actual reduction by each individual's decision to stop eating meat. To have an actual impact on emissions, a large enough number of meat-eaters would have to act in conjunction with each other over a long-enough period of time to be able to shrink the size of the livestock sector. Given that meat consumption has doubled over the last fifty years, my guess is you'll have to convince a whole bunch of your friends to join you at the salad bar. A hybrid car, on the other hand, actually reduces your own physical emissions immediately. You don't have to wait for your neighbor to trade in his Hummer for a Prius for your individual decision to make a (albeit very small) difference. I'm not saying I think you should keep eating meat - that's really up to you. I just wanted to point out the relative benefits of a tax credit for hybrid cards vs. for being a vegetarian. Besides, this line of thinking probably isn't that important anyway beacuse I don't think you could really implement this type of credit - how in the world would the government be able to verify that you, in fact, had not eaten meat?

About a year ago, we reported on the administration's opposition to continued funding of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, or "SIPP." SIPP, you may recall is an ongoing program that ""collect[s] source and amount of income, labor force information, program participation and eligibility data, and general demographic characteristics to measure the effectiveness of existing federal, state, and local programs." It is an indi

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released its biannual Economic Survey of the United States this week. The report itself will make for good summertime reading on the beach, but it's mention of income inequality makes it especially exciting. Policies and global trends that have made the economy more open, flexible and dynamic — thereby boosting productivity and overall prosperity — may have increased inequality. If unaddressed, concerns about inequality have the potential for eroding support for such policies.

Robert Egger, president of D.C. Central Kitchen and a leader of the Nonprofit Congress, has written this must read article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy ($$). Egger demands that the nonprofit sector no longer responds passively to a lawmaking process that has no charitable influence. Nonprofits have a responsibility to be vocal during any election.