The message circulating in Internet chat rooms, the halls of Congress and farm co-ops had America's farms facing financial ruin if the EPA required them to purchase air-pollution permits like power plants and factories do. The cost of those permits amounted to a cow tax, farm groups argued.
"It really has taken on a life of its own," said Rick Krause, a lobbyist with the American Farm Bureau Federation, which coined the term cow tax and spread it to farmers across the country. "This is something that people understand. All that we have to say is that (cows) are the next step with these proposed permit fees. And people are still talking about it."
link: THE INFLUENCE GAME: Excuse me! Lobby wins on burps - Yahoo! News
So it turns out all you have to do to kill a bill in our so-called house of so-called representatives is figure out some way to call it a tax. You call it a tax, you win.
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