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Generally you want to tax things you want less of and subsidize what you want more of. Hence taxing car traffic and subsidizing transit.
by jchanimal 8y ago
Generally you want to tax things you want less of and subsidize what you want more of. Hence taxing car traffic and subsidizing transit.
- baddox 8y agoI don’t know if I like your model. I would say tax things in order to remove negative externalities, then people will decide what they want more of.
- dymk 8y agoPeople elect leaders to pass laws to incentivize things they want more of, and disincentivize things they want less of.
- baddox 8y agoThat might be true, but what people actually want may not be the same as the most proximate cause of what they want. For instance, if all carbon emissions were required to be carbon-neutral, then carbon emission on its own isn’t so bad. If the cost of every gallon of gas includes the cost of sequestering the same amount of carbon that the gas will emit, then who really cares how much gas is burned?
- dymk 8y agoI don't think we're disagreeing on anything quite yet - if gas included the cost to offset all externalities from burning (not just carbon cost), but nox, ecological damage from drilling, transportation impact, sequestering airborne carbon near where it's burned, we'd probably be fine. But gas isn't priced that way, because we don't do all of the above to offset its effect on our cities and the environment. So we're continuing to impose more disincentives to burn gas.
- baddox 8y agoI’m in agreement. I just also approve of moving the externality adjustment closer and closer to its direct source as technology and processes make it efficient to do so.
- fabianhjr 8y agoGood thing incentivizing walking, biking, and transit line up with removing negative externalities: https://www.thediscourse.ca/scarborough/full-cost-commute https://www.thediscourse.ca/scarborough/full-cost-commute
- baddox 8y agoAbsolutely. I have no trouble with indirectly charging for negative externalities. As technology and processes improve that enable charging more directly for negative externalities, I approve of that.
- ip26 8y agoAccurately & precisely pricing the externalities of driving vs public transit vs walking vs biking is currently impossibly difficult, so you could say this is just a really crude swing at exactly what you're asking.
- CydeWeys 8y agoThese models are pretty much the same, just phrased a little bit differently. The reason you tax things you want less of is usually because of their negative externalities (and definitely is so in this circumstance).
- baddox 8y agoI mean, the difference is that you don't actually want less of the thing, or even less of the externality, you just want the person buying the thing to pay for the entire cost of the thing.
- CydeWeys 8y agoYou often do want less of a thing, in addition to the person buying the thing paying the cost for the entire thing. As one example, we do actually want less CO2 being released into the atmosphere, full stop. Or alternatively phrased, it's impossible to pay the true cost of the thing, as the true cost of everyone doing unrestricted emissions is that the human species goes extinct (which has effectively infinite cost). Or, similarly, imagine an industrial plant releasing waste that spreads through groundwater and poisons adjacent properties. We don't just want the industrial plant to pay the entire cost of the thing; we actually want them to not do that at all, because it infringes upon the properties of others, who do not want it to occur. So there's room for multiple times of frameworks that operate simultaneously -- Pay for the entire costs of some things, but also have less of or do not allow at all some things.