A carbon tax requires specific activity from the government on investment from the tax revenue.
It's not like other taxes.
4. You are not petros but yes it's nice to see another rational person on this forum.
Brad Wall's still blowing smoke on climate change
- Thread starter mentalfloss
- Start date
A carbon tax requires specific activity from the government on investment from the tax revenue.
It's not like other taxes.
4. You are not petros but yes it's nice to see another rational person on this forum.
Obviously if the revenue from a gas tax just goes towards subsidizing the gas industry, that would undermine its benefit. We could also improve its effect by promoting more pedestrian and cyclist-friendly urban planning by investing that revenue into walking and cycling paths for example.
But even if the government did not change its spending habits at all, it's just common sense that if you pay less income tax and more gas tax, you now have a greater incentive to live closer to work, no? So even just the tax itself without any change in government spending habits, all other factors remaining equal, encourages people to use their cars less. That's just straight logic.
So waht did you mean by 'requires specific activity from the government?' I read that to mean that a gas tax cannot be beneficial in its own right. Maybe I misunderstood you then.
Shhh, important people talking now.
You can have both.
You can have a tax that simply acts as general revenue or one where the revenue needs to be directed somewhere. And even that tax that might be for a specific purpose may also (as you've stated) have general value by merely being collected.
You can have both.
You can have a tax that simply acts as general revenue or one where the revenue needs to be directed somewhere. And even that tax that might be for a specific purpose may also (as you've stated) have general value by merely being collected.
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Sorry. The further east you in Metro Van the closer you are to 40 cents a litre cheaper gasoline with no Carbon tax from in Washington State.
Then you have an incentive for businesses to move near the border too. Hey, why not suck the US dry instead of of us if the US is stupid enough to allow us to do it?
Like I said, maybe an extractor-end tax would be preferable to a consumer-end tax. That way, we could still get cheap imported gas while leaving our own gas in the ground for a rainy day.
Tax revenue is used to support carbon reduction initiatives and incentivize people and corporations to use less CO2 through tax rebates.
It worked brilliantly in BC.
It worked brilliantly in BC.
Why do you keep changing your tune? It's not for lowering other taxes neutralizing it as you've claimed?
Unnecessary since the technology exists now to curtail carbon emissions. You want to tax people to solve a problem that doesn't exist
I think the confusion is this. In BC, it was a tax shift. Though Mentalfloss is using it as an example and supports it in principle, I think he would have preferred that it served as a tax increase.
It's not just about emissions but also about limit availability of the resource. A tax on extraccted non-renewable resources would discourage its extraction and so increase the incentive to produce it instead of just extracing it.
Don't confuse him with logic.
He thinks an entire industry can just flourish from tech that was invented this month.
What's wrong with using coal generators if its ends up being the cheapest and isn't adding CO2 to the atmosphere? Hint, this technology will finish coal and natural gas as power generators