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So rather than a cost proportional to how much waste you actually create, you'd rather have it be an equal tax on all drivers? That would eliminate the whole be
by shawnz 7y ago
So rather than a cost proportional to how much waste you actually create, you'd rather have it be an equal tax on all drivers? That would eliminate the whole benefit of a carbon tax for middle class: If you're just driving to work every day then you shouldn't have to pay as much as the people and organizations who are creating substantially more waste than you are. I think this approach would ostracize drivers even worse than current approaches.
- dalbasal 7y agoI'm not proposing anything, just discussing. To me, the first question is "will this work?" not "is this just/fair." Fairness and justice have to come in too, but the first question to ask if you're deciding about creating a price system is "can we?" We can obviously do fuel taxes. We do. That correlates pretty directly to emissions (within the domain of driving), but... we have experience here. We know that the demand elasticity to price is low in the long term and extremely low in the short term. Ie, You need a very big/painful tax to achieve a relatively small decline in emissions. There are questions of fairness/justice in all scenarios. Proportionality to waste is one issue. Proportionality to income is another. Different people will have different perspectives. But, before we even get to those, the question to answer is "what's our incentive?" Which (imo)needs to be answered in terms of reduced emission volume.