A Deal over Climate Change

Weekly Standard ^ | 2-18-2016 | IRWIN M. STELZER

[Citizen Zed]

Why not a carbon tax? ...

Climate change advocates will see it as a way to curb the consumption of fossil fuels, in part by narrowing the competitive gap with renewables; their opponents will see such a tax as meeting a long-held conservative view that it is more growth-friendly to tax consumption rather than the proceeds of work and risk-taking, to be paired with environmentalists' agreement to substitute the tax for the EPA's regulations. Both sides will recognize that a carbon tax, by leveling the competitive playing field, eliminates any need or support for subsidies for renewables. If necessary to protect America's competitiveness, reformers could also impose a tax on the carbon content of imports from countries that do not tax their own emissions.

Better still, the proceeds can be devoted to a simultaneous reduction in the payroll tax paid by workers below some reasonable income level. A $20 per ton carbon tax would increase pump prices by about 18-cents per gallon, estimate Roberton Williams and Casey Wichman of the University of Maryland, not a large burden in this day of $1.75 gasoline. And the impact on the lowest fifth of earners can be eliminated by devoting about 12 percent of the proceeds to such a purpose, according to Terry Dinan, senior adviser at the Congressional Budget Office.

[VTenigma]

Irwin lives in La La land. A carbon tax will never be applied to a payroll tax, it will be used to expand government.

[trebb]

Sounds like a socialist fantasy of finding a way to tax life and make it seem like it makes sense....

[Mister Da]

Once you’ve bought into climate change fraud, then accepting more redistribution of wealth is easy to accept.

It never occurs to the elites that taxes are the greatest burden on the non-rich. Or is it that they know it but just like theft?