Agree with you completely. A simplistic way of pointing this out is that EVERY tax and every cost regressively effects the poor more. If you are close to break-

Agree with you completely. A simplistic way of pointing this out is that EVERY tax and every cost regressively effects the poor more. If you are close to break-even, or you have negative surplus already, then additional cost is always worse for those who are worse off. The alternative is to levy large taxes on corporations who pollute, that come only after payroll expense. Then, you could create a progressive deduction where pollution taxes were zero for low income earners, while after some threshold everyone was taxed for polluting. It's unsatisfactory because the government hates earmarking specific income for specific outcomes and they much prefer the slush fund approach (for not entirely bad reasons). But, if pollution taxes specifically were spent on buying CO2 sequestration products which were deemed effective by the NSF or some other group, we might be able to create a non-regressive pollution tax to increase the net cost of polluting.