A Tax Some Repubicans Like

The Carbon Tax, which by the by is actually in effect in Alberta.

Which brings us to Alberta's small carbon tax. It has one – $15 a tonne for companies that exceed certain emission limits, with the money going into a technology fund. The trouble is that $15 a tonne is too low today to generate a lot of money, and will certainly be far too low tomorrow to generate the income the government will need to finance this expensive policy option.

However in Alberta the beneficiaries of this tax are the taxpayers; big oil.

And so with this model it should be no surprise that another capitalist who supports taxes is the CEO of Exxon; in this case the much hated Carbon Tax that Republicans and Harpocrites claim will kill jobs.

But a carbon tax appears to have little support in Ottawa. Both Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion have rejected the idea in the past, saying it will damage the economy.

Then there are Republicans who support carbon taxes because it undermines cap and trade, which by its sheer complications cannot actually function in the real market place.


Ironically its not Republicans but environmentalists and social justice advocates in California opposing it in favour of a carbon tax

February 16, 2011

But the environmental justice groups that brought the lawsuit against the Air Resources Board oppose the cap and trade program. These groups include the Communities for a Better Environment and the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment.

“Cap and trade will create toxic hotspots in low-income communities of color,” said Maya Golden-Krasner, a staff attorney for Communities for a Better Environment.

Those who support cap and trade say the revenue gained from the trading of emission rights will be used to forge programs for these poor populations, Pincetl said.

This argument does not satisfy the environmental justice community, though.

“This heavy reliance on cap and trade won’t get us where we need to be,” Golden-Krasner said.

The coalition seeks methods other than cap and trade to reduce carbon emissions.

“We are supportive of AB 32,” Golden-Krasner said. “We just want to see the Air Resources Board actually examine alternatives to cap and trade.”

These alternatives include a direct tax to carbon emissions.

It is also the reason Alberta was the first province to impose a carbon tax, to avoid cap and trade.

Why GOP Rep. Bob Inglis is looking for a new job.

Tue Aug. 3, 2010 2:00 AM PDT

Inglis voted against the cap-and-trade climate legislation, believing it would create a new tax, lead to a "hopelessly complicated" trading scheme for carbon, and harm American manufacturing by handing China and India a competitive edge on energy costs. Instead, he proposed a revenue-neutral tax swap: Payroll taxes would be reduced, and the amount of that reduction would be applied as a tax on carbon dioxide emissions—mainly hitting coal plants and natural gas facilities. (This tax would be removed from exported goods and imposed on imported products—thus neutralizing any competitive advantage for China, India, and other manufacturing nations.)

Here was a conservative market-based plan. Did it receive any interest from House GOP leaders? Inglis shakes his head: "It's the t-word." Tax. He adds, "It's so contrary to the rhetoric we've got out there, to what Beck, Limbaugh, and others are saying."

January 2009

The world's biggest oil company, Exxon Mobil, has softened its hardline position on climate change by throwing its weight behind a tax on carbon emissions.

In a significant shift in stance, Exxon's chief executive, Rex Tillerson, told an audience in Washington that he considered a tax to be a fairer route to curbing emissions than a cap-and-trade system of pollution allocations.

"As a businessman it is hard to speak favourably about any new tax," said Tillerson. "But a carbon tax strikes me as a more direct, a more transparent and a more effective approach."

support for carbon taxes has been taken up by a growing cadre on the far right, including Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, economist Arthur Laffer, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), and yes, even climate wingnut Sen. James Inhofe (R-Gamma Quadrant). Hell, throw in a refunded gas tax and you get America's Worst Columnist© Charles Krauthammer too. Are we to believe that these folks understand the threat of climate chaos, want to reduce climate emissions the amount science indicates is prudent, and sincerely believe that a carbon tax is the best way to accomplish that goal?

Is a carbon tax in America's future?

By Timothy NoahPosted Thursday, Nov. 9, 2006, at 5:40 PM ET

Two days after the election, a movement is afoot to achieve an audacious Democratic goal. The weird part is that the people behind it are Republicans.

In a Nov. 9 Wall Street Journal op-ed, former Bush speechwriter David Frum suggested that President Bush propose a carbon tax. N. Gregory Mankiw, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Bush White House, suggested the same thing in an Oct. 20 op-ed in the Journal, and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan talked it up in late September. Harvard's Martin Feldstein and Weekly Standard contributing editor Irwin Stelzer like the idea, too. Slate "Moneybox" columnist Dan Gross took note of this unexpected GOP trend in an Oct. 8 New York Times column ("Raise the Gasoline Tax? Funny, It Doesn't Sound Republican").

On a purely theoretical level, it's not at all inconsistent for a Republican to advocate a carbon tax. Conservatives prefer taxing transactions to taxing income because it's a way to avoid progressivity; rich and poor get taxed at the same rate. (In his op-ed, Frum makes no bones about wanting to use the carbon tax to "split the opposition" and to lower taxes on "work, savings and investment.")

The reason that that conservatives can support a carbon tax is because it is a Pigovian Tax, which is a classical liberal economic argument.

Pigou Club is described by its founder as “an elite group of economists and pundits with the good sense to have publicly advocated higher Pigovian taxes, such as gasoline taxes or carbon taxes.”

Pigou Club was founded by Dr. Gregory Mankiw by stating his legendary manifesto in the Wall Street Journal. As time passed more and more economists were added to the list of people supporting the Pigou Club. They include people from all sides of political spectrum.

Tax and Spend Banker

So the solution to Americas deficit problem whether Federal or State government would be to increase taxes...or so says the CEO of JP Morgan bank; Jamie Dimon.

JAMIE DIMON: States have a lot of wherewithal, when you talk about this huge deficit, the deficit in California is equal to one percent of the GDP in California, so if they raise taxes one percent, they could pay their deficit. And that's true for some of the other states and they have the wherewithal

This should not surprise anyone, tax cuts and spending cuts are what got California in the mess its in still thanks to Proposition 13 back in the Seventies.

The most significant portion of the act is the first paragraph, which limited the tax rate for real estate:

Section 1. (a) The maximum amount of any ad valorem tax on real property shall not exceed one percent (1%) of the full cash value of such property. The one percent (1%) tax to be collected by the counties and apportioned according to law to the districts within the counties.

And now it has become the clarion call of the American right, reduce government, which means reducing public services such as education, health care, etc.

California public schools, which during the 1960s had been ranked nationally as among the best, have decreased to 48th in many surveys of student achievement.

Which when government can no longer provide them must then contract out the jobs, privatizing them, which leads to private profits at public expense.

And at the root of California's misery lies Proposition 13, the antitax measure that ignited the Reagan Revolution and the conservative era.

Proposition 13 was the brainchild of the late Howard Jarvis. The antitax crusader was a policy genius not unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both shared an affinity for designing deep structural change that, once embedded in the political system, is nearly impossible to alter without a massive change of heart by voters.

Jarvis created a similarly impregnable institution. When he rode the wave of anger over skyrocketing property-tax assessments to pass Proposition 13 in 1978, he included a two-thirds vote requirement for the passage of any new taxes in California — an insurmountable obstacle built on populist allergy to any kind of new levy. Beholden to a tax-averse electorate, the state's liberals and moderates have attempted to live with Proposition 13 while continuing to provide the state services Californians expect — freeways, higher education, prisons, assistance to needy families and, very important, essential funding to local government and school districts that vanished after the antitax measure passed.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1904938,00.html#ixzz1FBthoAOi

Harpers Crimilization of Canadians Is A Bad Investment

The Harpocrites right wing law and order agenda, though as la scandale Bev Oda shows the government itself is not above breaking the law, is typical right wing sturm and drang signifying nothing except a growth in the institutional prison industry.

The Harper Conservatives are under fire for their extraordinarily expensive legislative initiative, Bill S-10. Among other things, it seeks to spend at least hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers dollars on prison building, in order to impose a mandatory minimum term of six months in jail for anyone who grows more than six marijuana plants. Most Canadians, experts and non-experts alike, have criticized the proposal as costly and counter-productive, noting that it will imprison individuals who are mostly non-violent and who sell to willing adult consumers.

The cost is in some dispute. Correctional Services Canada estimates an increase in prisoner numbers of 3,400, requiring 2,700 new spaces, at a cost of $2-billion.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer, Kevin Page, thinks that lowballs the price tag. His office puts the increase in prisoner numbers at 4,200, at a cost of $1.8-billion for facility construction and an additional $3-billion a year for operations and maintenance. He suggests that by 2015/16, annual prison expenditure will have increased to $9.3-billion from the current $4.3-billion.

As a result the costs incurred will continue to balloon from lowballing by the government. And if the American experience tells us anything as we can see from the report below, the facts are that prison expansion is a drain on the public purse, with no rehabilitative or crime reduction consequences!

But let us not let the facts get in the way of a political ideology. After all these Republican Light Harpocrites are nothing if not panderers to American right wing ideology. An ideology that is the politics of fear.

Reason and the facts once again show that a policy of increasing the length of criminal sentences does nothing except expand the prison population, increasing costs to the public purse.

The growth of the corrections sector has other impacts. A number of rural areas have chosen to tie their economies to prisons, viewing the institutions as recession-proof development engines.
Though many local officials cite benefits, broader research suggests that prisons may not generate the nature and scale of benefits municipalities anticipate or may even slow growth in some localities. Record incarceration rates can have longer-term economic impacts by contributing to increased income inequality and more concentrated poverty.
Economic Impacts of Prison Growth
Suzanne M. Kirchhoff
Analyst in Industrial Organization and Business
April 13, 2010
Congressional Research Service
7-5700
www.crs.gov
R41177

P3 The Unvarnished Truth

The overall lessons from the case studies suggest that the prognosis
for future P3s is somewhat pessimistic. Governments have generally
found it difficult to effectively reduce their financial and budgetary
exposure. Furthermore, in some cases, governments have faced
significant increased political risk rather than reduced risk as they had
hoped. At the same time, their for-profit private sector partners have had
difficulty making adequate rates of return, although this is a tentative
conclusion as they have usually had incentives to publicly emphasize
losses.
In some respects, the somewhat negative findings are not surprising.
The public and private partners in P3s inevitably have conflicting
interests (Teisman & Klijn, 2002; Trailer et al., 2004). Studies have
shown that in other contexts with similar conflicting interests, such as
mixed enterprises that are jointly owned by private shareholders and
government, the result can be “the worst of both worlds”, achieving
neither high profitability nor worthwhile social goals (Eckel & Vining,
1985; Boardman & Vining, 1989). In sum, while the allocation of
decision-making and risk-sharing in P3s can vary widely, if decisionmaking
authority and financial risk-bearing are not appropriately and
clearly matched, incentives will be misaligned and effective outcomes
are unlikely. This raises the question of whether governments can learn,
individually or collectively, to adequately specify contract conditions and
institutional conflict resolution mechanisms ex ante so that the past is not
a prologue for the future.