Care to develop that thought further? How high would it have to be to begin to diminish fossil fuel usage?
(1) The carbon tax is going up. Here’s how much more you could pay at the pumps | Globalnews.ca
I don't know about the numbers. We fleshed this out several months ago and it seemed clear that the carbon tax to completely offset the entire payroll tax would be so high as to be impossible. So you need a smaller number.
But the key of it is that it's designed for simplicity. As a general rule, taxing things make them more expensive and thus means you'll get less of them. In this case, we
are taxing employment which will ostensibly reduce it (dumb) while
not taxing CO2 output which is something we want to reduce (also dumb).
Ideally if you reduce taxes on employment, you'll either get more employment, or wages will rise so that money goes into the workers pocket, or the money gets returned to shareholders as corporate earnings.
Ideally if you increase taxes on CO2 output, you'll see reduced CO2 output because it makes every CO2 alternative relatively cheaper, or even if you don't have substitutes the raised cost will cause people to think more about their consumption and perhaps just reduce non-essential energy usage.
As I said, I don't think it will reduce CO2 output enough to make a difference. But it's a lot smarter to increase the price of CO2 output while reducing the price of labor. Tax what you want less of. Don't tax what you want more of.
Maybe it doesn't solve climate change, but it's a lot smarter than how we're taxing now.
