re: #12 Aceofwhat?

Not when [mostly] offset by lower income and property taxes.

What are you talking about? A lot of the people affected by that tax wouldn’t be paying any significant income tax whatsoever, nor property tax.

And please tell me you don’t think there’s a substantive difference between taxing a producer and taxing their product. You really think the cost won’t melt its way down to the end product? Come on, dude.

Yes, I do, because I know how products are priced in the real world, and it’s not by applying cost + x. It’s what the market will bear.

The only difference in what we’re saying is that your method is more difficult, more expensive, and less effective. But the price at the pump is going up either way.

The price at the pump will go up to the extent that the new ideal price changes. That price is not determined by the production costs alone; it is mainly determined by what people are willing to pay for the product. If the company could be ‘passing down the cost’— i.e., charging the higher amount— they would be doing so already.

It is true that a portion of the cost of the tax will be passed down to the consumer— if you make the tax on the actual commodity itself. What I’m saying, however, is taxing the profits of the energy companies in proportion to how much those profits are made on CO2-producing sources, not taxing the actual material itself— with that tax forgiven if they spend those profits on genuine clean energy research and implementation.

Your plan— to tax the actual consumption of fossil fuels, is, first and foremost, unworkable. People who have an oil furnace at home are going to need to burn oil to survive the winter. They’re not going to suddenly be able to do without that, or find a clean energy source. A clean energy solution is not going to pop up overnight. And you’re not going to be able to make it up to them by cutting their taxes when many of them do not pay significant amounts of income taxes anyway.