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How do you get people to vote for this given that it will increase prices/lower their standard of living today?

• ericd 3y ago
  It's revenue-neutral, so all money collected gets redistributed out evenly, per-capita (the "dividend" part). The way that then works out is that if you're responsible for less carbon emission than average in your country, then you end up ahead, potentially well ahead. Since carbon emission maps pretty well to material consumption, and things like flying a lot, that means that most people will end up ahead, and this mainly costs more for people on the richer end of the spectrum. Likely the breakeven point is well above the median, given how wealth and income are distributed in a bit of a power law distribution. An extremely rich person gets the same amount back as anyone else, but his yacht and private jet become a hell of a lot more expensive to run. This also has the benefit of making local manufacturing more competitive with overseas, since transportation becomes a larger part of the cost of goods. This would give blue collar workers back some of the leverage they've lost over the past decades. So most people voting in just their short-term self-interest would do well to vote for this. And everyone gets the long-term benefit of civilization being less likely to collapse with massive resource shortages. The challenge is explaining it well enough that people understand well that it's in their benefit. But I think "all the money from the tax goes into your bank accounts every month" would help a lot.