Need help with carbon tax paper?

Question

OK I'm doing a paper about Carbon Tax. I need some more ideas/angles. So far I talked about how its like a pigoivan tax and why it is fundamentally better than a Cap and Trade system. I don't want bias spams, I want ideas for a paper. Thanks for you help in advance.

Answer 1

A fundamentally better tax ?  There be no such animal.

Answer 2

Carbon tax is likely not salable unless it is presented as part of a package of tax changes that do not increase total taxation... ie a revenue neutral package.

British Columbia has instituted a revenue neutral partial carbon tax, such that a trivial tax on motor fuels is applied and used to provide a modest income tax reduction for low income people. The amount goes up each year, and the number of people benefiting from the tax break increases.

Quebec put in a similar carbon tax but did not make it revenue neutral. Yet their total tax did not rise.

It seems that the total amount of taxation is not really driven by what taxes are collected so much as what expenditures are made.

Well, the Current Bush regime appears to be spending so much more than it raises in tax that anyone replacing G.W Bush may have to increase taxes regardless of how they are raised.

Perhaps British Columbia and Quebec were just lucky that their carbon tax came along when they did not have major deficits to dig out from.

A fear of Americans that a carbon tax would be a big tax grab may be well justified. There may  no way for any government to contain tax growth after this government. For America the choice might be a carbon tax  instead of a large increase in income taxes.

If a carbon tax accomplishes its objective, of course consumption of fossil fuels should drop and with that drop would come reduction in that income to government. But with that reduction in consumption we get less money leaving hte country for the fuel.

A carbon tax and declining consumption of  coal of course presents political difficulty in coal mining country. Coal is the fuel most heavily affected by a carbon tax applied on the basis of carbon content of the fuel.

Coal is so significant to electric power and industry that politicians have a lot of difficulty even discussing carbon tax and coal in the same topic. It is like opposing ethanol in Kansas.

Answer 3

no more taxes or there might be a revolution