Lance Wallace writes in Tips and Notes:
The Congressional Budget Office has released an analysis of the effects of a carbon tax.
At $20 a ton. they estimate about $1.2 trillion in revenues over a 10-year period. A money quote for me is:
“Without accounting for how the revenues from a carbon
tax would be used, such a tax would have a negative effect
on the economy. The higher prices it caused would
diminish the purchasing power of people’s earnings,
effectively reducing their real (inflation-adjusted) wages.
Lower real wages would have the net effect of reducing
the amount that people worked, thus decreasing the overall
supply of labor. Investment would also decline, further
reducing the economy’s total output.”
The CBO goes on to soften this by saying that certain ways of spending the revenue (e.g., reducing deficits or marginal tax rates) might result in a net benefit. But just returning the revenues to the low-income homes most affected by the rise in cost of electricity (16%; range 7% (California) to 27% (Illinois, West VA, etc.)) would not decrease the total cost of the carbon tax.
Report here http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44223_Carbon_0.pdf
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Nothing at all to do with climate change, and everything to do with redistribution of dwindling wealth. In other words, in your face, suckah!
does it say how many jobs will be killed?
What puzzles me is that Europe is a laboratory for this nonsense. We can see what they are doing. They succeeded in Carbon taxing, putting up Windmills and PV Solar… and now, to help offset that mixtake, up go COAL plants. If this is not an “about face” that we can learn from… I digress.
Generate, or confiscate?
Budgeting for broke! Doesn’t any of these people understand? Dead country walking!
Beautiful vicious circle.
Yes, it will create 1.2 trillion, at least for a while. Then companies will pass on the extra costs to the consumers, then the consumers will have less money to spend, then the companies will make less money, they will start shrinking, then economy takes another hit, etc.
More taxes just mean more spending. Look at Europe. In my country we have the highest tax income ever. Our deficit and national debt is strangely also as high as never before… And keeps growing… Hmmm… How odd is that!
Hang on, isn’t revenue from carbon taxes supposed to be used to mitigate the fearsome effects of the naughty poison gas CO2? I thought the idea was to subsidise inefficient windmills and pay for the planting of extra chrysanthemums to clean the air for us or something?
They’re just gonna see the bottom line, lick their chops, buy up more guns and ammo for the Feds, waste enormous sums of it on election campaigns etc. They’re just gonna use it to perpetuate themselves and their lies. Send them all to their precious melting Arctic in canoes, swimming togs and sandcastle buckets. Give a damn when they freeze to death!
Gillard * Australia *
– Obama can see the effect on the political career of the Australian Primeminster & the Labour party after her wild predictions that a CO2 Tax would give the country a budget surplus, but reality hit when the CO2 credit price stayed low and so within a few months they have a massive budget deficit.
If Wall Street were taxed on speculative investment ie: derivatives, CDO’s etc. more would be accrued in a single year.
In Europe we suffer from all the redgreen experiments and taxes. Please take note of the failures. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are values at risk.
Don’t let it happen as we did. This will fundamentally change your country, for the worst.
“Lower real wages would have the net effect of reducing
the amount that people worked, thus decreasing the overall
supply of labor. Investment would also decline, further
reducing the economy’s total output.”
that’s the plan right there. Guess how emissions reduce, you hobble the economy. More people on guberment benefits, more people vote for said guberment. A self-perpetuating voting scam. This was Gordon Brown and Labour’s plan in the UK and it almost worked.
As a Brit, where this has already happened, stop it now. Here, we cannot go one day without paying some sort of climate-change tax on something or other. It’s like a disease.
Why stop at 20$/ton? Think big and big things happen, besides maybe they can boost my SS a bit with all of those carbon dollars.
“Without accounting for how the revenues from a carbon
tax would be used, such a tax would have a negative effect
on the economy. The higher prices it caused would
diminish the purchasing power of people’s earnings,
effectively reducing their real (inflation-adjusted) wages.
Lower real wages would have the net effect of reducing
the amount that people worked, thus decreasing the overall
supply of labor. Investment would also decline, further
reducing the economy’s total output.”
This is, pretty much, exactly the opposite to what Gillard said about the carbon tax she said she would not introduce at the last General Election (Sept 14th is when she will discover what Aussie voters think about that). Now at AU$23 tonne/CO2, the price on inputs to business/industry went up on 1st July 2012. Ford AU Ltd recently announced 1200 job losses citing costs, labour AND energy, were the main factors in their decision. The EU zone is the carbon tax/ETS experiment that all countries should be observing closely.
look at Australia we have $26 per ton and all the manufacturing Companys that produce green house gases are either closing or moving off shore we cannot wait till September when we kick out the Gillard labour Gov’t in your direction watch this very closely because you can do the same as we will be doing at the the next election
Looks to me like a carbon tax in the US is a good idea then, because I can’t see anything else that might raise enough money to deal with the US national debt. You guys have borrowed a truly ridiculous amount of money mostly from the savings of poor people in China – people who are not exactly flush with cash to begin with. What – did you think you would never have to pay it back?
In Australia the carbon tax, or as the Mendacious Bovine would like it referred to “Carbon Price”, has been a disaster. It has reduced the standard of living, driven up power prices, cost jobs and the only real CO2 reductions that have occurred are due to manufacturing businesses closing. Much of the country now appears to be “on hold” waiting for the next election.
If there is any benefit to a carbon tax, it is that it is not just political poison, it is political dioxin. Julia Gillard effectively took a funnel and chugged a 44 gallon drum of it. The upcoming September 14 election date is now widely referred to as “Whacking day”. Gillard is not just going to be voted out, she is going to be ejected. Some are questioning if the Labor party itself can survive.
Winston Churchill once said,a country that tries to get out of debt by raising taxes is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
Anthony,
I agree with your quote, but in my own opinion the rule is easier than that. Money are just the credit of wellness produced by the individuals, no way they are the wellness themselves.
Making money without supply any wellness to the society leads to a dilution of the welfare. That is, to its impoverishment.
Producing wellness means solving problems, not inventing problems and solving them.
This is the very way economists are eroding our society.
They invented the way to make money with money via the stock exchange, arguing that the value of a company is no longer a function of its products, but just of its stock exchange attractiveness.
They found the way to make revenues for themselves, in no ways they create wellness for the society neither for the companies involved in the stock exchange transactions.
I’m not a leftist, but I believe that until men will not return to understand that “work” means produce tools and services to make life more comfortable, we never exit from the current economical crisis.
If the governments which apply taxation as a way to produce $$$ were right, I suggest them to liberalize thefts & robberies, that suffice to produce money incomes to the citizens.
If the ancestral governors didn’t invent the penalties for those crimes, they could be considered the most profitable ways to make money.
Have a nice day.
Massimo
And the harder he tries the more likely he is to break the bucket.
The economic folly of this claim is staggering.
Of course a carbon tax will not produce anything at all.
It will hinder production.
It would increase government tax revenues in dollar amounts without increasing the underlying economy that gives those dollars the value they have. The money is taken out of investment and transferred to consumption, to the overall detriment of the economy. I do commend to everyone Jo Nova’s post: http://joannenova.com.au/2011/09/the-submission-i-would-have-made-if-they-had-a-sense-of-humour/
The nation can never be compensated.
The CBO’s predictions for the economy haven’t been right in 20 years. Remember when they said the federal economy would be in surplus until, what, 2025? [Good thing it wasn’t, nor will be, or the depression would have been permanent.]
And a loss to the real economy of how much? One.two trillion over 10 years? $120 billion/year? And this does what, other than impoverishing people?
“AleaJactaEst says:
May 31, 2013 at 12:08 am”
On SBS news tonight Americans claiming unemployment benefit rose by 10,000 this month. So Obama’s fight against climate change via the reduction of emissions of CO2 from human activities appears to be working.