A great idea that everyone hates (Matthew Yglesias, Jul 28, 2026, Slow Boring)
The good news is that there is a very straightforward and well-understood idea that would have a meaningful short-term impact on prices without killing incentives for new investment.
The bad news is that nobody in their right mind even talks about this idea because it’s universally understood to be politically toxic and something everyone would hate.
I’m not here to dispute that diagnosis, just to say that failing to even talk about it is impoverishing the discourse — I keep encountering efforts to essentially recreate it with extra bells and whistles, and I don’t think that anyone coming up with these “new” ideas is taking seriously enough the question of why we don’t just do the straightforward thing.
So what’s the straightforward thing? It’s simple: We could charge household electricity users the spot price of electricity.
Tax externalities.