- 07 Nov 2017 16:47
#14860328
They're both carbon pricing schemes.
Directly financing infrastructure spending and green tech R&D. There are many ways to finance it that don't involve regressive taxation. I'd start by nationalizing the coal and oil companies, raising the capital gains tax, and reducing the military budget by at least 50%.
Works in theory, but not very likely to play out that way in the real world. Maybe there would be a honeymoon period, but then the tax would start going up and the rebates down. And soon the neoliberal regressives would have the "FairTax" or the gas tax they've been dreaming about for decades.
Vlerchan wrote:I meet very few proponents of cap-and-trade over straight carbon taxation, even if cap-and-trade might be the first-best solutions it seems to be rather widely recognized that regulatory capture nullifies any appeal it once had. Perhaps we're residing in two separate information bubbles but that's the impression I have gotten.
Looking at what's being proposed politically there seems to be a pretty uniform movement towards carbon taxation over cap-and-trade.
They're both carbon pricing schemes.
Carbon pricing usually takes the form either of a carbon tax or a requirement to purchase permits to emit, generally known as cap-and-trade, but also called "allowances".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_price
What would you propose, out of interest.
Directly financing infrastructure spending and green tech R&D. There are many ways to finance it that don't involve regressive taxation. I'd start by nationalizing the coal and oil companies, raising the capital gains tax, and reducing the military budget by at least 50%.
There will be pass-through of this tax from producers to consumers. That's a large part of the basis of the tax's regressiveness.
With complete, lump-sum redistribution to consumers we would expect the consumer to be at least as well off - and, under conditions where firms can't pass-on the full value of the tax, better off*.
Works in theory, but not very likely to play out that way in the real world. Maybe there would be a honeymoon period, but then the tax would start going up and the rebates down. And soon the neoliberal regressives would have the "FairTax" or the gas tax they've been dreaming about for decades.
Socialism without freedom is fascism.