On a tangent to an email at work, I read this: "LaHood dismisses gas tax increase - The US Secretary of Transportation said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that a 10 cent increase in the gasoline tax is ‘not going to fly anywhere in America’ due to the recession. ..."
But the administration's cap-and-trade system, that will raise the price of carbon-emitting stuff - like, oh, say, gasoline - that's just the ticket.
Look, I love me a good Pigovian tax, and I've got nothing against a cap-and-trade system. But the unwillingness to acknowledge that cap-and-trade will be equivalent to a carbon tax drives me to distraction. Do the politicians really not understand it? Do they really think that citizens can't understand it? Or worse, _can't_ citizens understand it?
And worst of all, how can this kind of thing still bother me? Nihil novum sub sole. It must be late.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Don't read the news
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Nobody understands it. Not the carbon emitters (e.g. people who exhale), nor the farmers who might sequestur the carbon, nor the consumers who will see the cost of everything go up without explanation, nor the government who will ostensibly enforce the tax but cant decide whether its goal is to produce revenue or lower carbon emissions or both, nor economists, nor lawyers, nor law makers, nor scientists, nor aliens, nor the birds of the air, nor the fish of the sea.
The cap and trade idea is crazier than my idea instead of money being represented as a unitary value, money should be multi-dimensional (it should have coordinates and a vector)
People will start calling it the "Hat and barter" system or the "Put a bullet into a person and be removed from the roster of my sports franchise" system to prove how little they understand it. There will be a series of Kabuki moves by everyone who wants to pretend that they dont' not understand it. It will be akin to the day that everyone in the world farted at once and no one wanted to be the one who smelt it.
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