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-Jo Walton, Among Others
I guess the argument is that they will raise rent by the maximum, even at excessive risk of losing tenants? Because if the tenants will pay that much, why wouldn’t the landlord charge that anyway?
Definite agree with the core of what you’re saying, though for US and EU (and to a lesser degree “High income countries”), the numbers are quite close, as clean grid energy is significantly outpacing electric vehicle adoption (and EVs rely on a clean grid to be clean).
If you return the tax to everyone as a dividend, then it becomes progressive, while still encouraging less polluting options
Effective systemic change requires changing the systems, not individual people or companies. If we want less virgin plastic or gasoline burning, it needs to be less profitable to extract oil, process it, and sell it to people who want it, otherwise somebody is going to do that.
That is why in California, bees are fish
Every presidential election is important, and it never makes sense to make a “protest vote”. That’s just not how voting works.
I’m sure somebody has cried wolf at every election, but McCain and Romney never aimed to become dictators. Republicans currently have a published plan to institute fascism. It’s pretty obvious that these elections actually are exceptional.
This article is an abuse of the source data. “Working class” here is closer to manual laborer and excludes teachers, farm workers, military, emergency services, nurses, law enforcement, and others. The data is also fairly noisy, with typos and 2% of values being empty affecting the calculation.
To conclude that anyone not “working class” by this definition is “upper-class” is absurd. I guess for some it is hard to imagine the lofty former assistant manager at Burger King (D-AR) understanding the struggles of the common man.
There are certainly interesting discussions to be had about the disruptive influence of wealth on elections and about balancing representation with competence – and folks are having that discussion – but this article contributes less than nothing to those conversations.
Industrial strength anthropic principle
Oh man, don’t stop
You got it! Here’s some other consumer protections the administration has introduced recently:
Hungry for more? Check this out:
White House Statement on Junk Fees
That’s from October, so some of it overlaps, but among other stuff there’s still a “Click to Cancel” rule working its way through the FTC.
Sadly Biden has been spending a bunch of time on lame crap like climate change, human rights, health care, infrastructure, election integrity, etc., so it might take a bit longer for him to single-handedly usher in consumer utopia.
This seems entirely opposite to my observation. I’d say Biden and his administration are unusually focused on unfair or annoying business practices. In just the past two weeks the Biden administration:
There are over 2 million animal species on Earth, and one species is responsible for 99.9% of all lethal attacks. Ban Humans (from existing)!
The complete rules are here: https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/refundsfinalruleapril2024
The meat of it is the table on pages 9-14 and mostly comprehensible.
Worth noting:
The carbon dividend makes the policy overall progressive, like a mini-UBI. It seems we agree that helping the poorest people is a good thing, and they will benefit the most.
The carbon tax should not be an exclusive policy. Canada estimates its tax will account for 1/3rd of its emissions reductions by 2030. That’s a nice big chunk for one policy, but plainly insufficient on its own. Absolutely fund renewable infrastructure (including subsidies), public transport, walkable/bikeable housing, etc. Set hard limits / bans where appropriate (banning all emissions is not remotely feasible). A carbon tax is highly complementary to these.
Politics is messy. In Canada the Conservative Party (remind me – are they for or against fighting climate change?) opposes the carbon tax, and associates it with Labor, so they have a ton of propaganda against it. Half of Canadians don’t even realize they are getting a huge rebate back, let alone that it’s more than they are paying in taxes (Abacus Data). That’s why it’s important to get people to understand how a carbon tax actually works.
Funny running across this article after reading https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Spoiler: the author does not have a high opinion of Raghavan.
If you think businesses can just absorb a tax without changes, then great: set the price of carbon emissions at the cost to remove it from the atmosphere and problem solved.
More realistically, theory and practice both predict that businesses will look for cheaper (i.e. less polluting) approaches and consumers will choose cheaper (i.e. less polluting) products. And both will do so in ways that have the highest impact for the lowest effort.
Maybe you can clarify what you mean by taking money out of the equation, because it’s not clear to me what steps that involves or what the expected outcome looks like.
And the best thing to push the government to do is pass a Carbon Tax – tax polluters and give that back to the people.
It’s a general rule of wine pairing that the wine should be sweeter than the food