January 10, 2008
A LOT TO LIKE:
A tax even the Right might like: With so many smart conservatives speaking out in favour of carbon taxes, it's strange that the Harper Conservatives won't discuss the idea. (The Ottawa Citizen, January 09, 2008)
The pro-business C.D. Howe Institute, in the name of economic growth, calls for green-oriented taxes to replace taxes that penalize productivity, as income and corporate-profit taxes currently do. The Canadian Council of Chief Executives says that making our economy sustainable requires putting a price on pollution, including greenhouse gases.The Financial Times of Britain and The Economist advocate a carbon tax, as does Harvard economist (and former top George W. Bush adviser) Gregory Mankiw, on the grounds that such a tax would be a relatively transparent pro-environment measure and no harder to administer than a sales tax.
David Frum, an important conservative theorist and a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush, calls for a tax on fuels that underwrite repressive and unpredictable regimes such as Saudi Arabia's and Iran's. "[I]t would look exactly like the carbon tax advocated by global warming crusaders," he wrote last week in a piece for the American Enterprise Institute -- a piece in which he called upon sensible conservatives to take control of the environmental agenda from tree-hugging radicals peddling visions of apocalypse.<
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 10, 2008 12:13 PM
A consumption tax that the Right can get the Left to help pass -- and sell to women as showing that conservatives care about the environment--is too good an opportunity to pass up, just couple it with reductions on income taxation. Tax what you don't want, not what you do.
This is all too hilarious. For years the enviro-loonies have been claiming that we're all doomed because of "Peak Oil" and that even when this mythical shortage happens we'll never be able to retrain the economy because it's just Pollyana-ish wishful thinking that we can innovate our way out of the impending disaster.
And yet now we're supposed to think that adding a tax on oil will stimulate business to help us innovate out way out of the impending disaster.
Hmm. Doesn't take a genius to figure out the motivations and goals of those behind all this, does it?
Posted by: b at January 10, 2008 1:34 PMWhy are they using Frum as an example of a "smart" conservative?
Posted by: Bob at January 10, 2008 5:20 PMIt is good to "tax what you don't want", but the current administration is composed of people who worked in the oil industry. They want high-priced oil.
I once made the mistake of suggesting to Bush that he use the phrase cheap energy to describe the aims of his energy policy. He gave me a sharp, squinting look. Cheap energy, he answered, was how we got into this mess. Every year from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s, American cars burned less and less oil per mile traveled. Then in about 1995 that progress stopped. Why? He answered his own question: Because of the gas-guzzling SUV. And what had made the SUV craze possible? This time I answered, "Um, cheap energy?" He nodded at me. Dismissed.
http://ontheissues.org/2004/George_W__Bush_Energy_+_Oil.htm
Posted by: Brandon at January 10, 2008 6:54 PMHe's Jewish.
Posted by: oj at January 10, 2008 9:05 PM