Good point, giving the government any money is pretty much a waste. I'd still rather see a tariff than a ban on imports.

For ball pythons I suppose a tariff would have a big negative impact on the exporting countries to worry about. Presumably at some level the demand for more expensive imports would go down and there would be a lot less people digging up ball python eggs. That reduced mining of the wild population would likely reduce finding new morphs but if something new was still found it could still be legally imported. Higher prices and fewer imports might just have the effect of making the animals less disposable on this side though.

Still there will be some expenses to removing nuisance Everglades burms and running a program like the current licensing, chipping, and registration of captive burms to try to prevent further releases. If continued burmese python importation is determined to be part of the problem (and I don’t know if that has been proven) it seems that using the cost of a tariff in imported burms to reduce the number of imported burms and the moneys generated from that tariff to fund the effort to prevent and deal with released burms would be fair. But it would probably never work out in the real world.

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