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logo explaining where the tax goes. This is highly unlikely to occur in practice. A 

 tag might indicate that a tax of some kind is being paid, just as some products 

 advertise their contribution to worthwhile charity, but information concerning the 

 manufacturer's wholesale price is not the sort of information consumers normally 



A tax is like the price of any good or service in that it signals to the taxpayer the full 

 cost of government he or she is demanding. By concealing this information or simply 

 not communicating it in a meaningful fashion - the message "feel good about buying 

 this product because it has a green dot on the logo" is not meaningful - the 

 Birdwatcher's Tax denies valuable information to the voting citizen. 



Finally, this tax imposes real enforcement issues . We already have problems deciding 

 whether certain Japanese-made vehicles qualify as "light trucks" or passenger 

 vehicles. The wide range of disparate products to be taxed under this proposal and 

 the great variance in tax rates - from .25 to five percent - simply invites gaming of 

 the system and evasion or avoidance of the tax through any means possible. It will be 

 difficult enough to collect the tax in a reasonably consistent and fair way from U.S. 

 domestic producers, but I suspect the tax on outdoor equipment manufactured 

 overseas - especially the cheaper stuff made in China - will border on uncollectable. 

 So again, why bother? 



