Tax reform question

[midnight armadillo]

Yes, this applies to this forum ;-) I've read in passing ideas for replacing the income tax (or in addition to) with a tax on resource use or carbon use. Does anyone have any references on this idea? I think the Rocky Mountain Institute may have been involved in it.

With the Republicans talking about taxing consumption instead of wealth, perhaps it's time for the left to start talking about even more radical changes...

[phantom power]

1. I wonder how the accounting would work?

How much carbon do I use in a year? Hard to say, even if you could get people to care.

Still, there's probably some sort of 80/20 solution. The European gasoline taxes are a sort of carbon tax.

In my opinion, we ought to do the same with water. I paid something like $5 for the water I used last month. I live in a desert, where there also happens to be an ongoing drought, and unprecedented development of new homes.

[midnight armadillo]

2. I think they'd work sort of like a sales tax

There'd be taxes on either profits, sales, or both from mining and other extractive industries, along with taxes on energy use, etc. The idea is to use the tax code to promote convservation...

[NNadir]

3. The simple idea is simply to add the external cost of energy to

the internal cost, with the government collecting the external costs and administering them in such a way as to develop sensible energy and to pay those who suffer the most.

It will never happen though. We're too drunk on mercury to know what to do. That's the only way I can account for it.

[phantom power]

4. literally, "mad as hatters" :-)

[Massacure]

5. I did a post on this in the economic forum.

Will a donor please search for my thread on it?

It was named something around the lines of "thinking about taxes"

edit: I found it, it is still on the second page actually.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=114x14395

I figured about:

$620.34 per Ton of Coal.
$170.52 per Barrel of Oil.
$0.03 per Cubic Foot of Gas.
$0.10 per KWH of electricity.