re: #13 Obdicut

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.

Sure. You could increase low-income tax credits. Those people would still have incentive to reduce the amount of fossil fuels that they burn, to save more money, but don’t need to starve in the meantime. Again, this isn’t terribly complicated.

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.

Nope, not when the product is essential in the short term.

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.

But then you’re missing the point. We’re not trying to find a price that the market will bear. We are trying to depress the sale and use of a very specific set of products. That is one of many reasons why taxing the producer is less efficient for the purposes of reducing fossil fuel consumption.

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.

Yes. That is clunky, expensive to administrate, contains the potential for abuse, and difficult to forecast. You still haven’t elaborated on any single advantage to that approach, much less a confluence of advantages that would make it preferable to a Pigovian solution.

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.

Do we have a lot of time to reduce emissions or not? I don’t get the impression from the Ludwigs of the world that we can dither around. So of course we wouldn’t do this overnight, and of course lower-income folks may need a tax credit to offset some of the cost. But we need rapid change, and we’re not going to get it without some stern incentives. The same people you’re talking about are the ones most likely to suffer if our climate really starts to go haywire. If we don’t all pay a more punitive cost for fossil fuels, we won’t change.

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.

There are an absolute wealth of things that folks could do to conserve energy if the cost were more dear. They simply don’t have the proper incentive to do so. Taxing energy companies won’t light nearly the same fire as a pigovian tax.

And get the income tax thing out of the way - that’s easy - call it income tax credits. That’s not an obstacle to anything i’m proposing. We already hand out tax credits to low-income earners, remember?