It's still brilliantly more efficient and elegant. Plenty of other goods and services are taxed that face this same problem.
Cap and Trade has provided subsidies and rewarded some of the biggest polluters.
There's a very strong, fair and efficient case to be made for it. It would do a lot to reduce GHG emissions and raise tax revenue in a more socially just way (better than taxing jobs).
Government wants companies not to get off carbon for the $$$; but companies want to get off carbon (to some extent) as they would not have to pay carbon taxes.
It's just like any other tax. Companies are good at tax avoidance (note: this is legal unlike evasion).
Yes, and the party doing the taxing is also the party controlling things like import duties on solar panels.
> It's just like any other tax
Exactly. And once you introduce it, others like it will be sure to follow. Except they will be levied on the alternative energy sources which are cannibalizing carbon, because the state coffers demand it.
Well, the government can issue bonds (hope I'm using the right word) against that carbon tax to get a steady stream irrespective of the carbon emitted (other people would bear that risk of how much carbon tax would be collected).
Actually, companies producing more carbon due to government is not really a severe problem because the carbon tax compensates for the carbon produced (at least in theory).
Governments that provide comprehensive healthcare funding have an incentive to want people to stop smoking. Whether some governments actually want that is an exercise in guesswork.
Edit: This is consistent with real-world observation. Anti-smoking policy is the greatest in the US where the plutocracy benefits from increased healthcare spending, and relatively lower in social welfare states in Europe.
