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That would hurt the poors while the wealthy would still be able to buy loads of stuff. Maybe a tax that would become bigger the more you buy? Like, the more gas

That would hurt the poors while the wealthy would still be able to buy loads of stuff. Maybe a tax that would become bigger the more you buy? Like, the more gas or electricity you consume, the more expensive it gets per unit? But it would be very hard to implement I guess..

netrus 5y ago
I think some European countries are on the right path: the tax money is not gone, just distribute it equally (as the externalities of emissions hurt everyone in the same way), and the poor will be fine. If only we could roll out such a scheme globally, it would be the just and definite solution for climate change. Your individual emissions are above the global average? Tough luck. Are they below the global average? Congratulations, your higher purchase price for iphones is more than compensated by the payout everyone worldwide gets every month.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  It isn't that simple. Some geographies have intrinsically higher carbon footprints than others, all other things being equal and with similar levels of effort and investment. The cost of reducing carbon footprint is not remotely uniform, through no fault of the people that live there. Differentially taxing people by virtue of where they live for no local purpose is reliably unpopular in similar contexts, and that would easily be the case here.
edflsafoiewq 5y ago
>That would hurt the poors while the wealthy would still be able to buy loads of stuff. Yes, that is how wealth works.
Jensson 5y ago
Just put all the taxes collected from it into a "emission pool", then distribute it evenly among the people. That way the rich buying a lot of stuff effectively is them paying for the poor's emission quota. Or any of the many other ways to handle this, there are so many solutions to the problem that it is not an issue unless you want it to be.
- caeril 5y ago
  Brilliant. Yes, we're facing a consumption catastrophe, so let's distribute more funding toward more people so they can consume more. This is almost as fantastic as the HN zeitgeist of: 1. OMG there's a climate apocalypse coming due to the carbon emissions of about a billion people! 2. There's another 6 billion people we need to either import into, or bring up to the living standards (e.g. carbon footprint) of, those first 1 billion. 3. What? Oh lol you heartless rationalist, #2 doesn't conflict with #1 because uhhhh.... Elon Musk exists? (no analysis of the actual energy requirements and fossil fuel mix over time is provided or considered, just an assumption of cornucopian miracles) No, TFA is correct. We need to consume less, end our obsession with "growth", and most importantly, divest ourselves of the bleeding-heart suicidal idea of quadrupling our energy requirements with immigration and/or foreign aid. There will be a time to do that, when our energy mix is largely renewables, but not yet, and not within at least half a century.
lcam84 5y ago
Also we could redistribute the tax as a sort of UBI. This way not only product that pollute would be more expensive, people would have the ability to say no to crappy jobs.
wittycardio 5y ago
Wealthy people will always be better off by definition, it shouldn't stop us from doing the right thing
- what_is_orcas 5y ago
  But I think it's a good argument for reconsidering how we do wealth-distribution in America.
gamegoblin 5y ago
I think this kind of progressive consumption tax would be amazing for society. In a capitalist society, the theory goes that the individuals who are better at allocating capital will accumulate more capital, allocate it better, thus accumulating more, etc. in a loop. I could be convinced that some people are much, much better at allocating capital than most. It makes sense to let them be our societal capital allocators. Obviously, we want limits so that if 1 person makes a serious misjudgment, it doesn’t completely tank society. But I could see it being the case where, if we were purely optimizing for sum-total societal capital accumulation, it would be optimal 1% of the population to be in charge of 90% of the capital. There are a few obvious problems with this scheme where it meets reality, though. The most over-arching is that our current system allows the controllers of capital to more or less arbitrarily convert between capital and consumption. That is, some billionaire can burn some of their capital and buy a $500MM mega-yacht. At the end of the day, this is essentially wasting the labor of 10,000 people for a year (at 50k average salary). Even if we accept the premise that Jeff Bezos is a better capital allocator than 99.99% of people, I think we could argue that his having a $500MM mega yacht is not going to increase his capital allocation ability. This is where the progressive consumption tax comes in. Imagine a tax that was quadratic with consumption. For example, you’d pay $1K in tax on $10K of consumption, $100K of tax on $100K of consumption, and $10MM in tax on $1MM in consumption (obviously these are example numbers, any upwardly curved function will do, though). It very quickly becomes prohibitively expensive to consume much more than some societal average. This would significantly decrease consumption inequality. There are a lot of second-order things affected by this tax: - becomes much harder for 1 billionaire to burn capital in order to consume marketing and influence elections - one could use some proceeds of this tax as simple transfer payments, so not only is it quadratically more expensive to consume more, but the revenue from doing so gets send to people lower on the consumption distribution. This enhances the consumption flattening effect. - reduces conspicuous consumption which is good for climate change - improves labor productivity by increasing the societal savings rate (driving investment and increasing capital allocation per unit of labor), which further enhances this whole flywheel - more things that are too long for this comment There are obvious implementation problems though. On the face of it, it seems more difficult for me to hide consumption than it is to hide wealth, but I’m sure there are schemes to do so. The basic form of this tax would be to demonstrate to the tax agency some accounting of your wealth (savings, investments, etc) at two points in time, and then your consumption is computed based on the net inflows and outflows.

netrus 5y ago

I think some European countries are on the right path: the tax money is not gone, just distribute it equally (as the externalities of emissions hurt everyone in the same way), and the poor will be fine. If only we could roll out such a scheme globally, it would be the just and definite solution for climate change. Your individual emissions are above the global average? Tough luck. Are they below the global average? Congratulations, your higher purchase price for iphones is more than compensated by the payout everyone worldwide gets every month.

jandrewrogers 5y ago
It isn't that simple. Some geographies have intrinsically higher carbon footprints than others, all other things being equal and with similar levels of effort and investment. The cost of reducing carbon footprint is not remotely uniform, through no fault of the people that live there. Differentially taxing people by virtue of where they live for no local purpose is reliably unpopular in similar contexts, and that would easily be the case here.

edflsafoiewq 5y ago

>That would hurt the poors while the wealthy would still be able to buy loads of stuff. Yes, that is how wealth works.

Jensson 5y ago

Just put all the taxes collected from it into a "emission pool", then distribute it evenly among the people. That way the rich buying a lot of stuff effectively is them paying for the poor's emission quota. Or any of the many other ways to handle this, there are so many solutions to the problem that it is not an issue unless you want it to be.

caeril 5y ago
Brilliant. Yes, we're facing a consumption catastrophe, so let's distribute more funding toward more people so they can consume more. This is almost as fantastic as the HN zeitgeist of: 1. OMG there's a climate apocalypse coming due to the carbon emissions of about a billion people! 2. There's another 6 billion people we need to either import into, or bring up to the living standards (e.g. carbon footprint) of, those first 1 billion. 3. What? Oh lol you heartless rationalist, #2 doesn't conflict with #1 because uhhhh.... Elon Musk exists? (no analysis of the actual energy requirements and fossil fuel mix over time is provided or considered, just an assumption of cornucopian miracles) No, TFA is correct. We need to consume less, end our obsession with "growth", and most importantly, divest ourselves of the bleeding-heart suicidal idea of quadrupling our energy requirements with immigration and/or foreign aid. There will be a time to do that, when our energy mix is largely renewables, but not yet, and not within at least half a century.

lcam84 5y ago

Also we could redistribute the tax as a sort of UBI. This way not only product that pollute would be more expensive, people would have the ability to say no to crappy jobs.

wittycardio 5y ago

Wealthy people will always be better off by definition, it shouldn't stop us from doing the right thing

what_is_orcas 5y ago
But I think it's a good argument for reconsidering how we do wealth-distribution in America.

gamegoblin 5y ago

I think this kind of progressive consumption tax would be amazing for society. In a capitalist society, the theory goes that the individuals who are better at allocating capital will accumulate more capital, allocate it better, thus accumulating more, etc. in a loop. I could be convinced that some people are much, much better at allocating capital than most. It makes sense to let them be our societal capital allocators. Obviously, we want limits so that if 1 person makes a serious misjudgment, it doesn’t completely tank society. But I could see it being the case where, if we were purely optimizing for sum-total societal capital accumulation, it would be optimal 1% of the population to be in charge of 90% of the capital. There are a few obvious problems with this scheme where it meets reality, though. The most over-arching is that our current system allows the controllers of capital to more or less arbitrarily convert between capital and consumption. That is, some billionaire can burn some of their capital and buy a $500MM mega-yacht. At the end of the day, this is essentially wasting the labor of 10,000 people for a year (at 50k average salary). Even if we accept the premise that Jeff Bezos is a better capital allocator than 99.99% of people, I think we could argue that his having a $500MM mega yacht is not going to increase his capital allocation ability. This is where the progressive consumption tax comes in. Imagine a tax that was quadratic with consumption. For example, you’d pay $1K in tax on $10K of consumption, $100K of tax on $100K of consumption, and $10MM in tax on $1MM in consumption (obviously these are example numbers, any upwardly curved function will do, though). It very quickly becomes prohibitively expensive to consume much more than some societal average. This would significantly decrease consumption inequality. There are a lot of second-order things affected by this tax: - becomes much harder for 1 billionaire to burn capital in order to consume marketing and influence elections - one could use some proceeds of this tax as simple transfer payments, so not only is it quadratically more expensive to consume more, but the revenue from doing so gets send to people lower on the consumption distribution. This enhances the consumption flattening effect. - reduces conspicuous consumption which is good for climate change - improves labor productivity by increasing the societal savings rate (driving investment and increasing capital allocation per unit of labor), which further enhances this whole flywheel - more things that are too long for this comment There are obvious implementation problems though. On the face of it, it seems more difficult for me to hide consumption than it is to hide wealth, but I’m sure there are schemes to do so. The basic form of this tax would be to demonstrate to the tax agency some accounting of your wealth (savings, investments, etc) at two points in time, and then your consumption is computed based on the net inflows and outflows.