Comments on: The Case for a Revenue-Neutral Gas Tax

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 15:08:48 +0000

Social Security and Medicare expenses are only tenuously linked to FICA revenue, as I understand things.

By: Victor

Victor — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 13:53:41 +0000

Social Security and Medicare have a serious funding problem. Reducing FICA contributions by $624 per capita each year would only make that problem worse.

By: James James

James James — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 08:53:04 +0000

Bruce Charlton's Law: Things must always get worse before they can get better; Because otherwise they already would be better. I have a variant which I call Charlton's Law of Politics: In a democracy, you'll be left with a bunch of policies which you can't implement, because they'll have short-term costs but long-term gains.

By: James James

James James — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 08:50:21 +0000

Right. You ought to tax bad things to make people do them less (whether they are bad for other people — negative externalities — or just bad for the person doing them), and you ought not to tax good things, and you especially ought not to tax things with positive externalities. Taxing incomes and not CO2 is crazy — of course it should be the other way round.

(By the way, if releasing CO2 is bad, then the solution is just to slap a tax on it, instead of wasting time telling people to fly less or whatever.)

These policies are obvious, so why haven’t they been implemented? Politics is not about policy.