Quote:
Originally Posted by MattyC
I'm confused a bit here. You stated governments should be addressing the needs of the province and then implementing a tax structure that pays for it, no?
Or are you more suggesting a more basic overall tax structure that gathers funds however possible and disperses them as funds are needed?
I don't know if dedicated taxes are flawed or not. In theory, it seems to work. Similar to the idea of allocating some tax revenue from weed to drug rehab programs. I think that's kind of the only way you can sell something like taxing carbon emissions.
I mean, if you're going to tax me for my usage, you sure as hell better be putting some of that money towards figuring out how to make it so I can afford to NOT use these things, at least eventually. Because the reality is, currently we can't. But also currently we have to stop using this stuff. So we're kind of at a weird impasse here where economic factors are becoming less important to people concerned about the overall physical problem here. It's not necessarily that the economics are being misunderstood. More that, in the face of the physical destruction of the eco-system in which we live, something as abstract as money (particularly when being siphoned from what are very well-off areas of society) doesn't seem like a priority.
That might scare some people here, but a lot of us are genuinely concerned about what our lives are going to look like in the long term if things keep going as is. People from my parents generation seem to balk at that notion as just paranoia, but the majority of people in my age group, that I speak to any ways (which vary from the dirtiest hippies you can imagine to creationists who are oil engineers), acknowledge that this is going to have to be something that gets dealt with in our lifetime and we'd like to get it started ASAP.
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All I'm saying is that government spending decisions needs to be completely disconnected form how the government collects taxes.
So a Carbon tax over the long term will favour non carbon intensive technologies being implemented. This is a good thing. The size and scale of the carbon tax needs to be set up to accomplish this goal.
A diversified economy is good for this province so some programs helping diversification are also likely a good idea.
The odds that the correct size and scale of the carbon tax to accomplish its goal and the correct size and scale of green diversification are the same is zero. So arbitrarily forcing all money collected from a Carbon tax into green initiatives is stupid.
Whether or not we tax weed we should figure out a way to help people who want to quit and educate people of the dangers. Should weed users pay a tax to offset the cost of the harm done by having legalized weed? Probably. Should we tax weed to increase its price to make it less accessible to children, probably. Are the sizes of these three goals identical? Of course not.
It might make a good sales pitch but policy wise it's terrible.