Quote:
Originally Posted by Bownesian
(taking the bait)
I'm actually in favour of carbon taxes and consumption taxes in general. What I'm not in favour of is increasing the tax base under the cloak of environmentalism and using it to fund new, very costly social programs, and then creating exemptions that favour certain regionally important pet industries. Nor am I in favour of increased taxes going to fund politically top-down energy generation projects that aren't economical and don't save GHG emissions like the Ontario Liberals did. They blew billions on green jobs that disappeared the same minute the subsidies did and microgeneration projects that are totally inefficient pipe dreams that still aren't hooked up to the grid.
Exemption-free carbon taxes that replaced personal and corporate income taxes would efficient and useful if they were high enough to make a real difference, (say enough to bump your gasoline or natural gas bill by 25%) but that's not what was proposed in either of the last two elections. Instead, the first iteration targeted one industry's emissions preferentially over heating oil, transportation fuel and industries that are especially important to everything east of Manitoba and funnelled a significant chunk of the funds from that one targeted industry into per-capita (Ontario and Quebec) and lower-income targeted (Ontario and East) social programs. The second iteration I've talked about at length in this thread already and don't need to retread.
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Lol, now who's moving the goal posts? I don't want to see a bunch of new programs put in place and haven't argued for that anywhere. I did find it particularly interesting that the Harper Conservatives destroyed Dion for wanting a carbon tax, which is exactly what the oil producers now seem to be coming around to.
Now your argument that the Liberals would somehow destroy the oil sands is looking less likely. It's hard to characterize a policy that the industry is in favor of as somehow gutting the industry.