Where is the ACLU when you need it?

Officially promoted by the Obama administration!

Heritage's blog, The Foundry: "Obama Couldn’t Wait: His New Christmas Tree Tax"

President Obama’s Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees—the Christmas Tree Tax—to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.

In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board. The purpose of the Board is to run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expend existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” (7 CFR 1214.46(n)). And the program of “information” is to include efforts to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States” (7 CFR 1214.10).

To pay for the new Federal Christmas tree image improvement and marketing program, the Department of Agriculture imposed a 15-cent fee on all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year (7 CFR 1214.52). And, of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent Federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees

But wait! It's not actually a tax, you see:

Acting Administrator Shipman had the temerity to say the 15-cent mandatory Christmas tree fee “is not a tax nor does it yield revenue for the Federal government” (76 CFR 69102).

The 15 cents, you see, goes to a board, established by the SecAg, that promotes Christmas trees by "carrying out the program established by" the SecAg. No wonder OTB headlines it, "A Christmas Tree Tax? No, Just Good Old Crony Capitalism."

The problem here isn’t that the Federal Government is imposing a “tax” on Christmas trees, but that it’s doing so to finance a program that it shouldn’t be implementing to begin with. The reason that the Christmas Tree growers want a program like this is because natural trees have been steadily losing market share to artificial trees in recent years. ... It’s a choice consumers are making in increasing numbers apparently, and the natural tree industry obviously doesn’t like it.So, they decided to get the government involved in “promoting” natural Christmas trees. ...

Why, then, do we need a government program to promote their sale?

We don’t, of course, and in reality the government shouldn’t be involved in product promotion of any kind. That’s not their job, it’s the job of the industry itself. If tree growers want to create a promotional campaign, then they can do so through their trade association. This simply isn’t something that the government should be doing, especially for a product that is sold primarily in a domestic market. Instead of doing that, though, they lobbied the government to create a program to do it for them.

What we’ve got here, then, is another example of crony capitalism, with the government putting its finger on the scale to benefit the natural tree industry at the presumed expense of the artificial tree industry and, most likely, the taxpayers (that 15 cent a tree fee is unlikely to be enough to fund the program completely). That’s crony capitalism, folks.

This administration hardly originated crony capitalism but Obama et. al. have perfected it to a high art.

However, clearly this program is unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment! As we all know, the government with its partner, the ACLU, has been waging a War on Christmas Trees.

Okay, snark off. Actually, there are all manner of industries that use the government to promote their businesses and this sort of fee is by far from uncommon - as even DefendChristmas.com reports, "Akin to similar programs that promote milk, beef and cotton, the new Christmas tree program will impose on U.S. domestic producers and importers an initial fee of 15 cents per tree." However, it is still accurate to describe the fee as a tax because it is remission of revenue to the federal government by force of law, spent for purposes that are spelled out in law and regulation, carried out by an executive department.

The ACLU's web site is not terribly informative about its stance on Christmas trees per se. It does say that the government must not be in the business of promoting one religion over another or of promoting religion at all.

I hardly think that a program to strengthen the natural-tree growers is an endorsement of Christianity itself.  So no Constitutional line has been crossed. That doesn't mean that the program is wise or desirable. That no one in the government had a second thought about implementing it only shows how deeply rooted these back-scratching programs are in our polity. That's the problem, not 15 cents.