{"id":3779,"date":"2011-08-16T07:02:16","date_gmt":"2011-08-16T12:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=3779"},"modified":"2011-08-16T04:00:21","modified_gmt":"2011-08-16T09:00:21","slug":"carbon-taxes-may-be-the-new-debt-reducers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2011\/08\/16\/carbon-taxes-may-be-the-new-debt-reducers\/","title":{"rendered":"Carbon taxes may be the new debt reducers"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was an op-ed in Canada’s Globe & Mail last week by Todd Hirsch, a Calgary-based senior economist at a financial firm out there: “Debt is the new carbon.”<\/a> His premise was essentially as his title states, that climate change, despite a lack of action to date, will fall off governmental agendas to be replaced by a focus on debt reduction. Hmmm. Except he missed the point that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n

The New York Times editorialized<\/a> recently about revenue sources that will indeed need to be confronted in what is likely to be a difficult political debate. A carbon tax is staring Americans in the face as an opportunity:<\/p>\n

Congress should consider raising revenues in other ways, like a value-added tax, or carbon taxes. That way all of the needed revenue for deficit reduction, and for what government provides, does not need to be squeezed from the income tax. A value-added tax is conducive to saving, and a carbon tax helps protect the environment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Joe Romm at Climate Progress<\/a> also set out the case for a carbon tax’s possible introduction in the U.S. as part of a future debt ceiling deal after an Obama re-election (which he puts at 50-50). He cited this point from a Climate Wire piece in his blog item:<\/p>\n

\u201cA carbon tax could be an appealing alternative to even more ambitious cuts to entitlements and defense spending as well as a national value-added tax, repealing the home mortgage tax deduction, or higher income taxes,\u201d [economist Joe] Aldy said in an email. \u201cA well-designed carbon tax could raise some revenues to finance deficit reduction and enable a reduction in payroll tax rates, for example.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Canada, Professor Harrison of UBC recently made the argument as well<\/a>:<\/p>\n

…carbon taxes offer some near-term economic, and thus political, advantages that may have been underestimated.<\/p>\n

In particular, carbon taxes bring in government revenues that can be deployed for various purposes: investing in clean-energy infrastructure and (politically popular) job creation; stimulating the economy by cutting other, less efficient, taxes; and reducing government deficits at a time when traditional revenue sources are not delivering. The last of these probably accounts for the \u201cpublic benefit surcharges\u201d on electricity that some two-dozen U.S. states have quietly adopted in recent years. It has arguably also contributed to the survival of the B.C. carbon tax (and several long-established European carbon taxes), the revenues from which are essential to avoiding increases in other taxes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, it doesn’t seem to be as simple as Hirsch made it out to be in his Globe op-ed where he concluded “Sorry, carbon, you’ve been replaced” as a focus of governments in favour of debt reduction. Carbon and debt reduction could go hand in hand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was an op-ed in Canada’s Globe & Mail last week by Todd Hirsch, a Calgary-based senior economist at a financial firm out there: “Debt is the new carbon.” His premise was essentially as his title states, that climate change, despite a lack of action to date, will fall off governmental agendas to be replaced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1243,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1420,2580],"class_list":["post-3779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-carbon-tax","tag-debt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1243"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3779"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3786,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3779\/revisions\/3786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}