42 ms·

Ex'Tax – The big idea

api 12y ago
I've heard versions of this before. It sounds almost like a no-brainer to me. Of course you should tax resources more than labor, especially non-renewable resources and those with negative externalities.
- epistasis 12y ago
  For example, a carbon tax? That definitely sounds like a no-brainer to me, unfortunately there's significant political resistance to even a fact-based debate on that one.
  - gd1 12y ago
    Do you mean a carbon dioxide tax?
    - epistasis 12y ago
      Of course! I've never encountered any unintentional confusion when using the term "carbon tax." For more understanding of what is meant by the term, see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax
- clarkm 12y ago
  Does having additional children count as using more non-renewable resources, or is it providing more labor?
  - api 12y ago
    It provides more labor. Whether or not it uses more resources, and which resources, depends. But if you tax resources themselves, it doesn't matter. I'd say tax non-renewable resources and externalities (e.g. CO2) most of all, for the same reason you tax liquor and cigarettes.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Both. But kids will be taxed on their resource consumption and, when they grow up, their labor.
- dublinclontarf 12y ago
  If I buy gold and bury it in the back yard, try taxing that.
jakozaur 12y ago
Great idea, but we need to think through execution. So far "green laws" like Germany Energiewende is not that successful: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/12/economist-explains-10 http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/12/ec... On the other tax, high taxes on oil encourage efficiency and public transport.
- cyphunk 12y ago
  I can't understand how they made this conclusion in the article "This means that traditional utilities have turned instead to much more climate-damaging coal for generation." Also cannot find references for the claim "Germans have ended up emitting more carbon dioxide as a result of the extra coal"
- sjtrny 12y ago
  "Not successful" according to conservative publication The Economist. A massive uptake in solar and wind power seems successful to me. They just need to iron out some kinks in the incentive scheme.
  - JetSpiegel 12y ago
    Indeed. Portugal had a similar system, the kinks are that the subsidies are a bit high, there's a lot of people buying solar panels just to sell the power back to the network. This is because the price per kilowatt uploaded is more expensive than downloaded. This is great, you get a big installed base with this short-term carrot, and when the subsidies are removed the panels are still in use. Win-win.
- cjg 12y ago
  The problem outlined by the economist article essentially boils down to the fact that the government wanted to subsidise renewable energy but didn't want to pay the subsidy so foisted the extra cost onto consumers with legislation requiring the utility companies to buy renewable energy when it was available. That's not a problem specific to all "green laws" as you seem to imply. The Economist does seem to come across as slightly biased in its reportage (I'm surprised), when they say "renewables undercut relatively climate-friendly natural gas on price". Relative to what? It becomes clearer as you read further, relative to coal, but the quoted statement makes it sound like natural gas is more climate-friendly than renewables. Clearly not.
xrange 12y ago
Sounds reasonable. The political optics angle might be interesting, since the "1%" is heavily labor based (Lawyers, Doctors, etc.), and the 0.01% isn't labor based, and I wonder how much it is resource based (i.e. Bill Gates and tech moguls aren't using natural resources, and the inheritance crowd aren't either).
- VLM 12y ago
  The lack of discussion of cap gains and corporate income tax is peculiar. The devil is always in the details. There is an assumption in the plan that labor is infinite and fungible and interchangeable and therefore quite worthless as a limitless pool, but reality is that "growing a doctor" takes a lot more time and resources than "growing a coal mine". As a strategy for centrally controlling a market, it would probably lead to more volatility in prices and supply and demand overall. I'm not sure how the excise tax would be different from a carbon tax. That may be the whole point, here's a new marketing spin on a bad idea, look, its got a new name and everything...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pradn 12y ago
The problem with taxing products higher is that it essentially becomes a regressive tax on the poor. If milk is $2 more expensive per gallon, that hits a poorer person much more than a rich person. This is why it's a hard sell to tax goods everyone relies on, like food, oil, and electricity. You could possibly then give a subsidy to lower-income people, but it's hard to track exactly how much a person spent on smaller items throughout the year.
- nightski 12y ago
  I liked the FairTax proposal - subsidy is given to everyone regardless of income level or spending and is enough to cover the tax on necessities. Of course it's never going to happen.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    FairTax's motto: "because the rich don't have enough advantages already" edit: Downvotes? Seriously? FairTax shifts the burden dramatically onto the middle class. A rich person pays no capital gains, and as long as they don't go buying billion dollar yachts, they'll pay next to nothing percentage-wise.
    - hipsterrific 12y ago
      The FairTax replaces all taxes and the prebate makes it progressive. The rich actually have no net benefit because in the income tax world, they're still rich and in the fairtax world, they're still rich. What progressive income taxation says is that you want to pull down the rich to bring up the poor. We need to pull up the poor and leave the rich alone. The rich have their wealth and will continue to maintain it. A tax plan should be transparent and it should allow the poor to save money and invest their way out of being poor.
      - ceejayoz 12y ago
        If the rich aren't pulling up the poor, who is? The middle class? I like the "it's progressive! progressive is bad!", incidentally.
mod 12y ago
Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Uy_qQDpv2bkJ:www.ex-tax.com/big-idea/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Uy_qQDp...
acd 12y ago
Current consumerism is not long term sustainable where we throw away devices every year that's built in low cost countries and are not built for recycling. Taxing materials will make an economic incentive for both producers and consumers to recycle
michaelt 12y ago
If the EU taxed metal mining, would EU car manufacturers be able to import from abroad and to save money? Or would there be an import tariff on foreign metal too? Would the money be rebated if the cars were exported, so they were competitive with cars from other countries, or would cars manufactured in the EU be more expensive than cars manufactured in other countries?
Xeoncross 12y ago
Finding alternative ways to tax seems like a straw man. Not that it's not a good idea, but why not find ways to cut many of the unneeded taxes first?
- cjg 12y ago
  Because you can't just cut taxes. You would either have to increase other taxes or reduce spending. Ex'Tax takes the first of these approaches.
- minot 12y ago
  This is why I hate the whole "starve the beast" idea. Even Cato Institute (which I disagree with on so many issues) agrees that starve the beast was a resounding failure. If we want to cut federal spending, we need to cut federal spending. We can't cut income and hope that this cuts spending. http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/policy-report/2004/3/cpr-26n2-2.pdf http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/po... Of course, in reality, nobody is a real conservative. Everybody only wants to cut spending on things they disagree with but I doubt there's anyone who will advocate spending cuts across the board, even if they benefit from such spending (and therefore the spending cut would hurt them).
  - epitrochoidal 12y ago
    Just curious, how do you identify a "real conservative"? Fiscal policy, social policy, what's the differentiator?
    - minot 12y ago
      Sorry, me using the word "real" was unwarranted and vague. I meant in terms of fiscal policy. I should have been clearer.
- rayiner 12y ago
  70% of the federal budget is mandatory spending on entitlement programs or interest costs. These programs are extremely efficient--over 99% of Social Security and 96% of Medicare dollars go to beneficiaries. So what's "unneeded spending?" Voters have decided that our country should have a safety net. As long as that's true, even if you get rid of all other spending you'd save at most 30% of the tax bill. Still a huge need to think of better ways to raise the remaining 70%.
cubano 12y ago
I find proposals like this often miss the political side of the equation ie wealthy donors and multinational corps simply allow the law to be passed, knowing, in fact, by spending down the line, they can get loopholes put into the law that will circumvent the system. Now, this, by in itself, is no reason not to support the idea (which I do, for the most part, esp. the lower taxes on wages), but I feel it should be addressed up front.
sien 12y ago
There is a lot of things they say that are not valid. The idea that we are running out of resources in general is wrong. The Simon-Ehrlich Wager showed how wrong this idea is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager There is an excellent book 'The Bet' about the wager. Over the course of the 20th century despite global population increasing by at least 200% and global GDP increasing even more prices of a bundle of metals decreased overall between 1900 and 2000. Since 1950 the world has extracted more than the known reserves of tin, copper, iron ore, lead and zinc and yet known reserves are bigger than in 1950! http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/NaturalResources.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/NaturalResources.html There is an energy problem. Fossil fuels are getting more expensive and anthropogenic global warming is a concern. However, Europe already has big taxes on fossil fuels. What Europe, and the rest of the developed world don't do is spend enough on researching better forms of nuclear energy. ITER and others are something, but it's not enough. A better approach would be to increase funding on energy research.
- TheCraiggers 12y ago
  >Since 1950 the world has extracted more than the known reserves of tin, copper, iron ore, lead and zinc and yet known reserves are bigger than in 1950! So, you propose that because we keep improving extraction methods / keep finding new deposits of non-renewable resources, that these resources are infinite?
  - adventured 12y ago
    The parent is very clearly not suggesting anything of the sort. They're pointing out that the hysteria focused on resource scarcity is unfounded, has been proven to be unfounded over and over again for the past century, and will likely continue to be shown to be unfounded for the next century.
  - bryanlarsen 12y ago
    By almost any measure, we ran out of copper a long time ago. We used to find copper in almost pure form, yet now a modern copper mine processes ore that is only a bit more than 1000 parts per million copper, which isn't a lot higher than random earth. We're not going to run out of earth any time soon.
stegosaurus 12y ago
I think a lot of the issues that result in high resource usage emerge from the way as a society we change the norms of what is considered 'essential'. A lot of the time, responsible decision making just has to be thrown aside if you want to actually function. Take owning a car as an example (UK perspective here; may differ in the US). With some effort, you can structure your life in such a way that one is not necessary and therefore get by via cycling/public transport. That may mean huge sacrifices, though. Families are often spread far and wide, it's not rare for two cohabiting partners to be stuck in a situation in which living close to work is a 'one or the other' choice. Would taxing fuel more fix that? I'm not sure. I think it's just considered a 'cost of doing business' (i.e. being employed). Similarly, 40 hour+ work weeks are normal. This results in people either trying to maximise their use of downtime (and thus choosing the bus that takes 20 minutes over the walk that takes an hour), or simply being exhausted enough that more 'convenience' purchases feel justified. I think we would all be far better off simply 'doing less' (for lack of a better term), and I think proposals like a basic income go quite far towards achieving that.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > Take owning a car as an example (UK perspective here; may differ in the US). With some effort, you can structure your life in such a way that one is not necessary and therefore get by via cycling/public transport. This is extremely tin-eared and utterly ignores the realities of farmers and ranchers. You know, the people who grow the food which the rest of the country relies on. Just blandly stating that cars aren't necessary is wrong.
  - stegosaurus 12y ago
    I took quite deliberate care to try to ensure that I spoke only of 'an individual', rather than the collective. You're spot on. The point I'm trying to make, distilled, is that we live in a world that has people commuting tens of miles to work each day. Could we fix that, preferably in a way that's not punitive? I believe without proof that fuel is an inelastic good; doubling the price of fuel (for individual use only) would not result in a halving of its' use, because it's necessary for many. Essentially; it takes effort for people to reduce their usage of some resources. For me to eat half as much cake is relatively trivial, it simply requires willpower. For me to use half as much energy than I do would require a very significant reshuffling of my life. My choices are limited, a tax hike would not change that. I think some people seem to have this idea that taxes are magical beasts. They can work if replacements are actually viable. But taxing food won't mean I eat less, I need it to survive. Hopefully you see what I'm trying to get at here.
markmassie 12y ago
This proposal seems to make a lot sense for deciding what to tax, but I am curious about how this would affect who is getting taxed and where these changes would be felt. It seems like decreasing taxes on labor (people) and increasing taxes on raw materials (things we dig out of the ground) would simply shift the tax burden away from urban areas (where people are) to rural areas (where the mines are). Wouldn't this just make things worse for poorest parts of the country, like Appalachia, where the mining industry is typically the only provider of well paying jobs?
- VLM 12y ago
  Something to think about is "the masses" are not going to quietly stop driving, stop working, stop eating, and die. They'll just pay more carbon tax. So if keeping 400M americans alive takes 400 train loads of coal, they'll still be mining and shipping 400 train loads of coal, just the next taxes paid to .gov will increase, everyone will be poorer, slightly lower standard of living, but the cops will spend money on more and better guns to shoot us with. Its not like the mine owners are going to eat the tax losses out of their own pocket, LOL. The price of their product will increase. As a side effect the more regulated an industry the more corrupt it'll be on average. So expect plenty of sweet tax loopholes to make up for it, so to be revenue neutral at the new higher tax rate the proles will have to pay even higher taxes. Higher taxes always result in higher tax evasion, I'm guessing black market coal would be non-trivial to work, but black market charcoal or black market firewood would become a pretty serious issue under this carbon tax 2.0.
jim_greco 12y ago
The problem with ideas like is that the amount of tax raised is small compared to what is collected in income taxes. It's a fantasy to think we can replace an income tax of up to 60% of income with an indirect consumption tax. An Ex'Tax also ends up being regressive like consumption taxes. The poor spend a lot larger percentage of their income on consumption (which are what those resources end up going into) then the rich do.
damonpace 12y ago
It's more likely that this will end up being a new tax on resources, instead of ending labor taxes. The true purpose of the tax is to create a new tax on resources. Ending labor taxes just seems to be a sales pitch to get support. From a cynics point of view, it's just a new way to sell a carbon/environmental tax. More taxes!=More Rainbows.
- SapphireSun 12y ago
  So here's something I've been wondering about for a while. Say you tax everyone exactly equally and like bitcoin, provide easy ways to divide denominations of money. How is the tax actually hurting anyone? Wouldn't the value of currency simply normalize to the post tax level? To me, the major difference between renormalizing currency and taxing (in this simple case) seems to be that the government can inject money into specific industries and projects without causing inflation (as the money supply is held level). Is this correct? If so, how does this apply to the real world? Is it just a special case?
  - notahacker 12y ago
    If the government has some automatic way of making half the money in people's bank accounts disappear into thin air, then yes, prices can be redenominated. Except for all those long term debts and contracts with future prices agreed; it's not so simple to accept a 50% pay cut when your mortgage stays the same. And in practice, if the government does take half the value of the money in circulation out of people's accounts, most of it will be find its way directly or indirectly into other people's bank accounts, so prices won't go down anywhere near 50% The major difference between taxing and renormalizing (or printing) money is stabilising the currency's value, but distributional effects are also important and mostly intended
applecore 12y ago
No mention of Georgism[1] and the economic efficiency of a land value tax? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
joosters 12y ago
Why can't these kind of advocacy websites bring themselves to talk about the downsides of their proposed plans? Nothing is perfect, and pretending that your proposal is simply flawless makes you look like a fool. Having the honesty to talk about weaknesses and drawbacks is what any sensible research should do (and not just so that they can hand-wave them away). If you can't deign to admit you and your ideas are not perfect, your campaign website makes you look narrow-minded and foolish.
- notahacker 12y ago
  In fairness, they do have a more detailed report which considers some of the downsides (they acknowledge putting VAT up puts some jobs at risk) as well as makes it clear their proposals are quite moderate (there's an income tax cut, but still a substantial income tax) and that they haven't done any macroeconomic modelling. It's also relatively easy to pick loopholes in, but at least it actually gives some of the specifics the pretty graphics and "tax some metals" of the rest of the website sorely lacks. http://ex-tax.com/files/4314/1693/7138/The_Extax_Project_New_Era_New_Plan_report.pdf http://ex-tax.com/files/4314/1693/7138/The_Extax_Project_New...
  - joosters 12y ago
    Thanks for the link - I had only discovered the white paper. IMO they should still have these things in there...

api 12y ago

I've heard versions of this before. It sounds almost like a no-brainer to me. Of course you should tax resources more than labor, especially non-renewable resources and those with negative externalities.

epistasis 12y ago
For example, a carbon tax? That definitely sounds like a no-brainer to me, unfortunately there's significant political resistance to even a fact-based debate on that one.
- gd1 12y ago
  Do you mean a carbon dioxide tax?
  - epistasis 12y ago
    Of course! I've never encountered any unintentional confusion when using the term "carbon tax." For more understanding of what is meant by the term, see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax
clarkm 12y ago
Does having additional children count as using more non-renewable resources, or is it providing more labor?
- api 12y ago
  It provides more labor. Whether or not it uses more resources, and which resources, depends. But if you tax resources themselves, it doesn't matter. I'd say tax non-renewable resources and externalities (e.g. CO2) most of all, for the same reason you tax liquor and cigarettes.
- rayiner 12y ago
  Both. But kids will be taxed on their resource consumption and, when they grow up, their labor.
dublinclontarf 12y ago
If I buy gold and bury it in the back yard, try taxing that.

jakozaur 12y ago

Great idea, but we need to think through execution. So far "green laws" like Germany Energiewende is not that successful: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/12/economist-explains-10 http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/12/ec... On the other tax, high taxes on oil encourage efficiency and public transport.

cyphunk 12y ago
I can't understand how they made this conclusion in the article "This means that traditional utilities have turned instead to much more climate-damaging coal for generation." Also cannot find references for the claim "Germans have ended up emitting more carbon dioxide as a result of the extra coal"
sjtrny 12y ago
"Not successful" according to conservative publication The Economist. A massive uptake in solar and wind power seems successful to me. They just need to iron out some kinks in the incentive scheme.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  Indeed. Portugal had a similar system, the kinks are that the subsidies are a bit high, there's a lot of people buying solar panels just to sell the power back to the network. This is because the price per kilowatt uploaded is more expensive than downloaded. This is great, you get a big installed base with this short-term carrot, and when the subsidies are removed the panels are still in use. Win-win.
cjg 12y ago
The problem outlined by the economist article essentially boils down to the fact that the government wanted to subsidise renewable energy but didn't want to pay the subsidy so foisted the extra cost onto consumers with legislation requiring the utility companies to buy renewable energy when it was available. That's not a problem specific to all "green laws" as you seem to imply. The Economist does seem to come across as slightly biased in its reportage (I'm surprised), when they say "renewables undercut relatively climate-friendly natural gas on price". Relative to what? It becomes clearer as you read further, relative to coal, but the quoted statement makes it sound like natural gas is more climate-friendly than renewables. Clearly not.

xrange 12y ago

Sounds reasonable. The political optics angle might be interesting, since the "1%" is heavily labor based (Lawyers, Doctors, etc.), and the 0.01% isn't labor based, and I wonder how much it is resource based (i.e. Bill Gates and tech moguls aren't using natural resources, and the inheritance crowd aren't either).

VLM 12y ago
The lack of discussion of cap gains and corporate income tax is peculiar. The devil is always in the details. There is an assumption in the plan that labor is infinite and fungible and interchangeable and therefore quite worthless as a limitless pool, but reality is that "growing a doctor" takes a lot more time and resources than "growing a coal mine". As a strategy for centrally controlling a market, it would probably lead to more volatility in prices and supply and demand overall. I'm not sure how the excise tax would be different from a carbon tax. That may be the whole point, here's a new marketing spin on a bad idea, look, its got a new name and everything...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

pradn 12y ago

The problem with taxing products higher is that it essentially becomes a regressive tax on the poor. If milk is $2 more expensive per gallon, that hits a poorer person much more than a rich person. This is why it's a hard sell to tax goods everyone relies on, like food, oil, and electricity. You could possibly then give a subsidy to lower-income people, but it's hard to track exactly how much a person spent on smaller items throughout the year.

nightski 12y ago
I liked the FairTax proposal - subsidy is given to everyone regardless of income level or spending and is enough to cover the tax on necessities. Of course it's never going to happen.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  FairTax's motto: "because the rich don't have enough advantages already" edit: Downvotes? Seriously? FairTax shifts the burden dramatically onto the middle class. A rich person pays no capital gains, and as long as they don't go buying billion dollar yachts, they'll pay next to nothing percentage-wise.
  - hipsterrific 12y ago
    The FairTax replaces all taxes and the prebate makes it progressive. The rich actually have no net benefit because in the income tax world, they're still rich and in the fairtax world, they're still rich. What progressive income taxation says is that you want to pull down the rich to bring up the poor. We need to pull up the poor and leave the rich alone. The rich have their wealth and will continue to maintain it. A tax plan should be transparent and it should allow the poor to save money and invest their way out of being poor.
    - ceejayoz 12y ago
      If the rich aren't pulling up the poor, who is? The middle class? I like the "it's progressive! progressive is bad!", incidentally.

mod 12y ago

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Uy_qQDpv2bkJ:www.ex-tax.com/big-idea/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Uy_qQDp...

acd 12y ago

Current consumerism is not long term sustainable where we throw away devices every year that's built in low cost countries and are not built for recycling. Taxing materials will make an economic incentive for both producers and consumers to recycle

michaelt 12y ago

If the EU taxed metal mining, would EU car manufacturers be able to import from abroad and to save money? Or would there be an import tariff on foreign metal too? Would the money be rebated if the cars were exported, so they were competitive with cars from other countries, or would cars manufactured in the EU be more expensive than cars manufactured in other countries?

Xeoncross 12y ago

Finding alternative ways to tax seems like a straw man. Not that it's not a good idea, but why not find ways to cut many of the unneeded taxes first?

cjg 12y ago
Because you can't just cut taxes. You would either have to increase other taxes or reduce spending. Ex'Tax takes the first of these approaches.
minot 12y ago
This is why I hate the whole "starve the beast" idea. Even Cato Institute (which I disagree with on so many issues) agrees that starve the beast was a resounding failure. If we want to cut federal spending, we need to cut federal spending. We can't cut income and hope that this cuts spending. http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/policy-report/2004/3/cpr-26n2-2.pdf http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/po... Of course, in reality, nobody is a real conservative. Everybody only wants to cut spending on things they disagree with but I doubt there's anyone who will advocate spending cuts across the board, even if they benefit from such spending (and therefore the spending cut would hurt them).
- epitrochoidal 12y ago
  Just curious, how do you identify a "real conservative"? Fiscal policy, social policy, what's the differentiator?
  - minot 12y ago
    Sorry, me using the word "real" was unwarranted and vague. I meant in terms of fiscal policy. I should have been clearer.
rayiner 12y ago
70% of the federal budget is mandatory spending on entitlement programs or interest costs. These programs are extremely efficient--over 99% of Social Security and 96% of Medicare dollars go to beneficiaries. So what's "unneeded spending?" Voters have decided that our country should have a safety net. As long as that's true, even if you get rid of all other spending you'd save at most 30% of the tax bill. Still a huge need to think of better ways to raise the remaining 70%.

cubano 12y ago

I find proposals like this often miss the political side of the equation ie wealthy donors and multinational corps simply allow the law to be passed, knowing, in fact, by spending down the line, they can get loopholes put into the law that will circumvent the system. Now, this, by in itself, is no reason not to support the idea (which I do, for the most part, esp. the lower taxes on wages), but I feel it should be addressed up front.

sien 12y ago

There is a lot of things they say that are not valid. The idea that we are running out of resources in general is wrong. The Simon-Ehrlich Wager showed how wrong this idea is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager There is an excellent book 'The Bet' about the wager. Over the course of the 20th century despite global population increasing by at least 200% and global GDP increasing even more prices of a bundle of metals decreased overall between 1900 and 2000. Since 1950 the world has extracted more than the known reserves of tin, copper, iron ore, lead and zinc and yet known reserves are bigger than in 1950! http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/NaturalResources.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/NaturalResources.html There is an energy problem. Fossil fuels are getting more expensive and anthropogenic global warming is a concern. However, Europe already has big taxes on fossil fuels. What Europe, and the rest of the developed world don't do is spend enough on researching better forms of nuclear energy. ITER and others are something, but it's not enough. A better approach would be to increase funding on energy research.

TheCraiggers 12y ago
>Since 1950 the world has extracted more than the known reserves of tin, copper, iron ore, lead and zinc and yet known reserves are bigger than in 1950! So, you propose that because we keep improving extraction methods / keep finding new deposits of non-renewable resources, that these resources are infinite?
- adventured 12y ago
  The parent is very clearly not suggesting anything of the sort. They're pointing out that the hysteria focused on resource scarcity is unfounded, has been proven to be unfounded over and over again for the past century, and will likely continue to be shown to be unfounded for the next century.
- bryanlarsen 12y ago
  By almost any measure, we ran out of copper a long time ago. We used to find copper in almost pure form, yet now a modern copper mine processes ore that is only a bit more than 1000 parts per million copper, which isn't a lot higher than random earth. We're not going to run out of earth any time soon.

stegosaurus 12y ago

I think a lot of the issues that result in high resource usage emerge from the way as a society we change the norms of what is considered 'essential'. A lot of the time, responsible decision making just has to be thrown aside if you want to actually function. Take owning a car as an example (UK perspective here; may differ in the US). With some effort, you can structure your life in such a way that one is not necessary and therefore get by via cycling/public transport. That may mean huge sacrifices, though. Families are often spread far and wide, it's not rare for two cohabiting partners to be stuck in a situation in which living close to work is a 'one or the other' choice. Would taxing fuel more fix that? I'm not sure. I think it's just considered a 'cost of doing business' (i.e. being employed). Similarly, 40 hour+ work weeks are normal. This results in people either trying to maximise their use of downtime (and thus choosing the bus that takes 20 minutes over the walk that takes an hour), or simply being exhausted enough that more 'convenience' purchases feel justified. I think we would all be far better off simply 'doing less' (for lack of a better term), and I think proposals like a basic income go quite far towards achieving that.

cbd1984 12y ago
> Take owning a car as an example (UK perspective here; may differ in the US). With some effort, you can structure your life in such a way that one is not necessary and therefore get by via cycling/public transport. This is extremely tin-eared and utterly ignores the realities of farmers and ranchers. You know, the people who grow the food which the rest of the country relies on. Just blandly stating that cars aren't necessary is wrong.
- stegosaurus 12y ago
  I took quite deliberate care to try to ensure that I spoke only of 'an individual', rather than the collective. You're spot on. The point I'm trying to make, distilled, is that we live in a world that has people commuting tens of miles to work each day. Could we fix that, preferably in a way that's not punitive? I believe without proof that fuel is an inelastic good; doubling the price of fuel (for individual use only) would not result in a halving of its' use, because it's necessary for many. Essentially; it takes effort for people to reduce their usage of some resources. For me to eat half as much cake is relatively trivial, it simply requires willpower. For me to use half as much energy than I do would require a very significant reshuffling of my life. My choices are limited, a tax hike would not change that. I think some people seem to have this idea that taxes are magical beasts. They can work if replacements are actually viable. But taxing food won't mean I eat less, I need it to survive. Hopefully you see what I'm trying to get at here.

markmassie 12y ago

This proposal seems to make a lot sense for deciding what to tax, but I am curious about how this would affect who is getting taxed and where these changes would be felt. It seems like decreasing taxes on labor (people) and increasing taxes on raw materials (things we dig out of the ground) would simply shift the tax burden away from urban areas (where people are) to rural areas (where the mines are). Wouldn't this just make things worse for poorest parts of the country, like Appalachia, where the mining industry is typically the only provider of well paying jobs?

VLM 12y ago
Something to think about is "the masses" are not going to quietly stop driving, stop working, stop eating, and die. They'll just pay more carbon tax. So if keeping 400M americans alive takes 400 train loads of coal, they'll still be mining and shipping 400 train loads of coal, just the next taxes paid to .gov will increase, everyone will be poorer, slightly lower standard of living, but the cops will spend money on more and better guns to shoot us with. Its not like the mine owners are going to eat the tax losses out of their own pocket, LOL. The price of their product will increase. As a side effect the more regulated an industry the more corrupt it'll be on average. So expect plenty of sweet tax loopholes to make up for it, so to be revenue neutral at the new higher tax rate the proles will have to pay even higher taxes. Higher taxes always result in higher tax evasion, I'm guessing black market coal would be non-trivial to work, but black market charcoal or black market firewood would become a pretty serious issue under this carbon tax 2.0.

jim_greco 12y ago

The problem with ideas like is that the amount of tax raised is small compared to what is collected in income taxes. It's a fantasy to think we can replace an income tax of up to 60% of income with an indirect consumption tax. An Ex'Tax also ends up being regressive like consumption taxes. The poor spend a lot larger percentage of their income on consumption (which are what those resources end up going into) then the rich do.

damonpace 12y ago

It's more likely that this will end up being a new tax on resources, instead of ending labor taxes. The true purpose of the tax is to create a new tax on resources. Ending labor taxes just seems to be a sales pitch to get support. From a cynics point of view, it's just a new way to sell a carbon/environmental tax. More taxes!=More Rainbows.

SapphireSun 12y ago
So here's something I've been wondering about for a while. Say you tax everyone exactly equally and like bitcoin, provide easy ways to divide denominations of money. How is the tax actually hurting anyone? Wouldn't the value of currency simply normalize to the post tax level? To me, the major difference between renormalizing currency and taxing (in this simple case) seems to be that the government can inject money into specific industries and projects without causing inflation (as the money supply is held level). Is this correct? If so, how does this apply to the real world? Is it just a special case?
- notahacker 12y ago
  If the government has some automatic way of making half the money in people's bank accounts disappear into thin air, then yes, prices can be redenominated. Except for all those long term debts and contracts with future prices agreed; it's not so simple to accept a 50% pay cut when your mortgage stays the same. And in practice, if the government does take half the value of the money in circulation out of people's accounts, most of it will be find its way directly or indirectly into other people's bank accounts, so prices won't go down anywhere near 50% The major difference between taxing and renormalizing (or printing) money is stabilising the currency's value, but distributional effects are also important and mostly intended

applecore 12y ago

No mention of Georgism[1] and the economic efficiency of a land value tax? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

joosters 12y ago

Why can't these kind of advocacy websites bring themselves to talk about the downsides of their proposed plans? Nothing is perfect, and pretending that your proposal is simply flawless makes you look like a fool. Having the honesty to talk about weaknesses and drawbacks is what any sensible research should do (and not just so that they can hand-wave them away). If you can't deign to admit you and your ideas are not perfect, your campaign website makes you look narrow-minded and foolish.

notahacker 12y ago
In fairness, they do have a more detailed report which considers some of the downsides (they acknowledge putting VAT up puts some jobs at risk) as well as makes it clear their proposals are quite moderate (there's an income tax cut, but still a substantial income tax) and that they haven't done any macroeconomic modelling. It's also relatively easy to pick loopholes in, but at least it actually gives some of the specifics the pretty graphics and "tax some metals" of the rest of the website sorely lacks. http://ex-tax.com/files/4314/1693/7138/The_Extax_Project_New_Era_New_Plan_report.pdf http://ex-tax.com/files/4314/1693/7138/The_Extax_Project_New...
- joosters 12y ago
  Thanks for the link - I had only discovered the white paper. IMO they should still have these things in there...