Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Shooters' tax dollars at work #2, Costco woke!

So in 2019 Costco was getting pressure at their annual stockholders' meeting to "wake up" and do something about their products produced by prison labor.

Specifically in the U.S. they were being accused because of the racial makeup of our nation's prison population to perpetuating "slave labor" if anything they sold was produced by less-than-market compensated laborers in prisons.

By 2020 Costco passed a policy to reject such contracts, and the Deer Lodge men's state prison in Montana was targeted by Costco. Costco held a contract lucrative to both the warehouse store system and the prison selling their diary product's to Costco stores across Montana (and perhaps neighboring states) under the Darigold label. Costco's contract with the prison dairy was terminated. Deer Lodge prison had to sell most of their dairy herd, maintaining only enough cows to supply prisoner's meals.

And suddenly the Deer Lodge prison had a large sucking sound in their budget. A call was put out to fellow Montana state agencies to be creative in ways to plug the fiscal gap.

In on a white horse rides the Director's office of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. They propose building a pheasant hatchery to raise and release on public lands 50,000 pheasants a year, using funds raised from hunter license sales combined with a majority of monies raised by the feds via the 11% tax on retail firearms and ammo sales. The pheasants are to be raised and released free-of-charge on public lands (where there are usually already wild pheasants), 90%+ are expected to die of starvation/predation or shooting by Jan. 1, and half the birds are hens which are illegal to shoot regardless (50% waste right there). Recall that Montana already has one of the most revered wild pheasant populations in the nation delivering far superior birds to the gun without subsidy.

So a commercially profitable income stream from dairy production is shifted by Costco's policy change intended to prevent the perpetuation of "slave labor" in Montana, to catalyze a $1mil./yr. full-loss expenditure by Montana's game agency of funds raised exclusively from hunting license sales and taxes on retail gun and ammo sales. It doesn't matter what party you like, hate, or vote for, or whether you don't like or think it is OK to release pen pheasants on public ground... this is a travesty.