Carbon Tax
For what it’s worth, I endorse the carbon tax. This article hits all the reasons why:
Yes, I’m talking about a carbon tax — the only mechanism powerful and direct enough for the daunting task of phasing out fossil fuels. Conventional “market forces” would be too volatile in the short term and too weak in the long term to provide the needed incentives, and would ravage the poor and middle class besides. And sole reliance on market forces — say, rising crude oil prices due to shrinking supplies — would simply open the door to massive development of synthetic fuels such as tar sands, liquefied coal and oil shale, bringing environmental and climate consequences many times worse than the oil they would replace.
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Sound awful? Only if we obsess over the empty part of the glass. Don’t forget, a heavy carbon tax means enormous revenues, enough to eliminate not just workers’ social security payments but, most likely, all federal income taxes on everyone’s first $100,000 of income, and state sales taxes to boot. Recycling the tax windfall through rebates or tax shifts will ensure that in the aggregate the nation’s hundred million households have as much money as now. Although energy will cost a lot more, families that now use less energy than average (that’s almost all poor families and many middle-class ones) will end up with more spending money than now.
- more here
(This is in line with my old thinking, but the words “carbon tax” are better, and will play better, especially as understanding of Global Warming spreads.)
June 26th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
Agree completely with the carbon tax. I think it is the single most important thing we could do to spur conservation. It would have a faster response than increasing CAFE standards (which should be done as well) and it would punish processes that merely recycle fossil fuels into “green” fuels. If you only gave me 1 change that I could make in order to spur us toward energy independence, a carbon tax would be my choice.
RR
July 2nd, 2006 at 7:48 am
Much as we all may like to think of ourselves as taxpayers, if the tax man takes from us $30,000 after giving us $100,000, we’re not. We are, in that event, tax takers.
As such we must anticipate that revenue-neutrality will sell best, to the tax-paying majority of which we are not members, if the tax reductions precede the tax increases by several months at least.
July 3rd, 2006 at 7:12 am
After giving us $100,000?
Trying to follow … I see that per capita federal expenditures are running upwards of seven grand:
TRAC Report