The Population Crisis: the Stork, the Plow, and the IRS, 77 N.C
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NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW Volume 77 | Number 1 Article 4 11-1-1998 The opulP ation Crisis: The tS ork, the Plow, and the IRS Mona L. Hymel Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Mona L. Hymel, The Population Crisis: The Stork, the Plow, and the IRS, 77 N.C. L. Rev. 13 (1998). Available at: http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/nclr/vol77/iss1/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in North Carolina Law Review by an authorized administrator of Carolina Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE POPULATION CRISIS: THE STORK, THE PLOW, AND THE IRS MONA L. HYMEL* Tax policy can function as an economic and social tool to influence behavior. The U.S. Congress, however, has failed to use this tool in addressingproblems of overpopulationin this country. Instead, as Professor Mona Hymel argues, current tax policy exacerbates problems of overpopulation in three specific areas: reproductive rates, the strain on agricultural and natural resources, and the overconsumptive lifestyle of U.S. citizens. As it functions now, the U.S. tax system has a pronatalistbias, it fails to encourage sustainable farming practices and the conservation of resources, and it actually encourages overconsumption. This pattern can be altered, however, through proposals made by Professor Hymel such as environmental taxes, preferential treatment for practices such as organic farming, and the elimination of tax exclusions that encourage urban sprawl, to name a few. Since the United States sets the pace for the world on important social issues, Professor Hymel argues that it is imperative for the country to take the lead on addressing the catastrophic effects of overpopulation. Tax policy provides a viable place to start. I. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................... 15 II. THE STORK AND THE PLOW: BACKGROUND ON THE POPULATION PROBLEM ............................... 18 A. CarryingCapacity ............................................................. 18 B. United States CarryingCapacity ....................................... 21 C. When the Stork and the Plow Collide: Effects of Exceeding Carrying Capacity............................................ 25 D. The U.S. Government's Attempted Response to * Associate Professor of Law, University of Arizona College of Law. B.B.A., University of Texas, 1981; J.D., University of Texas, 1992. C.P.A., Texas. I thank my colleagues Professors Barbara Atwood, Mark Ascher, Toni Massaro, and Joel Seligman for helpful comments in earlier drafts and for their support during this project. I also thank Virginia Abernethy, Joshua Sarnoff, and Lindsey Grant for their comments. My research assistants, Christopher Fairchild and Elizabeth Cirillo, deserve more pay than they got for their Herculean research efforts, as well as the law school library staff. Last, I thank my family for their patience and dedication. NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 77 CarryingCapacity Problems............................................. 31 E. The Stork Whips the Plow into Submission: Current EnvironmentalRegulation ................................................. 36 III. THE IRS: THE STORK AND THE PLOW Go SHOPPING- TAX POLICY CHOICES ............................................................... 39 A. Tax Policy as an Economic Tool to Confront Overpopulation.................................................................. 39 B. Tax Policy as a Social Tool to Confront Overpopulation.................................................................. 43 IV. THE STORK: TAX POLICIES AND HAVING BABIES ......... 48 A. How Tax Policies Make More Work for the Stork ......... 48 B. The IRS and the Stork: Specific Examples ..................... 55 1. Dependency Exemption .............................................. 55 2. Head-of-Household Status .......................................... 62 3. Earned Income Tax Credit ........................................ 64 4. Child Care Credit ........................................................ 67 C. Giving the Stork a Rest: Tax Policy for Small Families..... 68 1. Tax Reform and Factors that Reduce the Birth R ate .............................................................................. 68 2. More Reform: Tax Incentives and Penalties ........... 73 V. THE PLOW: THE U.S. AGRICULTURAL SYSTEM NEEDS REFORM IN ORDER TO MEET FUTURE POPULATION FOOD DEM ANDS ........................................................................ 76 A. Is the Plow Broken?........................................................... 76 B. The Plow is Breaking: More About the Problem .......... 77 1. Agriculture's Impact on the Environment ............... 80 2. The Environment's Impact on Agriculture ............... 85 C. Tax Policy and ConventionalAgriculture ....................... 87 1. A New Plow: Alternative Agriculture ..................... 90 2. A Better Plow: Research Efforts ............................... 92 3. More New and Improved Plows: Tax Incentives and Penalties ................................................................. 93 VI. THE STORK WITH A WEIGHT PROBLEM: OVERCONSUMPTIVE LIFESTYLES EXACERBATE OVERPOPULATION ...................................................................... 101 A. Consumption Patternsand Overpopulation ...................... 101 B. The Stork on a High-Fat Diet: Tax Policy and Consumption ......................................................................... 106 C. The Stork Goes to the Fat Farm: Can the Consumerist Change? .................................................................................123 VII. THE STORK AND THE PLOW BECOME FRIENDS: A COMPREHENSIVE TAX POLICY STRATEGY FOR DEALING 1998] THE POPULATION CRISIS AND TAXES WITH THE PROBLEMS OF OVERPOPULATION ..........................131 I. INTRODUCTION As the twentieth century draws to a close, humanity faces the daunting prospect of supporting its population without inducing catastrophic and irreversible destruction on Earth's life-support systems. Human and agricultural fertility are on a collision course: the stork is threatening to overtake the plow.' More than 600 of the world's most distinguished scientists, including a majority of the living Nobel laureates in the sciences, issued a warning to humanity in 1992. They warned that only a few decades remained to stop unrestrained population growth and environmentally devastating economic practices before efforts to achieve a sustainable future "will be lost and prospects for humapity immeasurably diminished."3 In 1994, the world's scientific academies echoed this warning.4 The very rapid rates of human-induced climate change, combined with fragmentation of natural habitats for agriculture and development activities, are unprecedented. The human population took from origin until 1830 to reach the one billion mark.6 By the year 2050, world population is predicted to top ten billion.7 If fertility levels remain at 1990 levels, the United Nations predicts that by the year 2150, world population will approach 694 billion.8 Likewise, U.S. population increases are 1. PAUL R. EHRLICH ET AL., THE STORK AND THE PLOW 1 (1995). 2. See Union of Concerned Scientists, World's Leading Scientists Issue Urgent Warning to Humanity, Nov. 18, 1992, Press release, available in LEXIS, Envirn Library, Panews File. A follow-up warning was issued in 1997, just prior to the Kyoto Summit on Global Warming. See World Scientists' Callfor Action at the Kyoto Climate Summit (last visited Aug. 20, 1998) <http://dieoff.org/pagel23.htm>. 3. Union of Concerned Scientists, supra note 2. 4. See POPULATION-THE COMPLEX REALITY: A REPORT OF THE POPULATION SUMMIT OF THE WORLD'S SCIENTIFIC ACADEMIES 17-18 (Sir Francis Graham-Smith ed., 1994) [hereinafter THE COMPLEX REALITY]. 5. See Gretchen C. Daily, Introduction: What Are Ecosystem Services? in NATURE'S SERVICES: SOCIETAL DEPENDENCE ON NATURAL ECOSYSTEMS 1, 3-6 (Gretchen C. Daily ed., 1997) [hereinafter NATURE'S SERVICES]. 6. See STEPHEN D. MUMFORD, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF NSSM 200: How THE DESTRUCTION OF POLITICAL WILL DOOMED A U.S. POPULATION POLICY 29 (1996). 7. See Elizabeth Rohrbough, Comment, On Our Way to Ten Billion Human Beings: A Comment on Sustainability and Population,5 COLO. J. INT'L ENVTL. L. & PoL'Y 235, 235 (1994); Erla Zwingle, Women and Population,NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, Oct. 1998, at 38 (stating that the United Nations estimates world population in 2050 will range from 7.7 billion to 11.2 billion). 8. See id.; see also Edwin R. McCullough, Through the Eye of a Needle: The Earth's Hard Passage Back to Health, 10 J.ENVTL. L. & LITIG. 389 (1995) (concluding that at 16 NORTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 77 staggering. U.S. population will come close to doubling between now and the year 2050.1 As the world's most prolific consumers, Americans, along with the rest of humanity, face a disturbing future. This Article examines the extent to which current U.S. tax policies implicate this collision course between the stork and the plow.10 To date, the impact of our tax policies on problems of overpopulation has been given only minimal and scattered consideration. Given the potential enormity of this problem, I evaluate how the current tax system exacerbates the problems associated with overpopulation. In Part II, I begin by describing the overpopulation problem from a scientific or anthropological 1992 rates world