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?
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.
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?