https://www.quora.com/In-your-opinion-what-should-the-United...
The only good tax…a tax on “bads”
The U.S. federal government first imposed a [temporary] personal income tax in 1861, in order to pay for the Civil War. The tax was later made permanent in 1913. In other words, our country is stuck on a nineteenth century tax model, collecting 95% of our revenue from labor and investment. I believe government slaps taxes on income and investment out of sheer momentum. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If we were designing a tax framework from the ground up, it would surely look different. In its simplest form, I’d say it would entail taxing “bads” instead of taxing “goods”. Let me explain.Of the $2.4 trillion in federal tax receipts collected every year in the U.S., 95% comes from taxing labor and investment. These are activities that generate social benefits; jobs, goods, and technological progress. Economists call these positive externalities, but we can simply call these “goods”. On the flip side, less than 2% of the $2.4 trillion in federal revenue comes from taxing—waste, pollution, and resource depletion—activities that generate social ills like obesity, heart disease, cancer, urban sprawl, materialism, and resource wars. Economists call these negative externalities but we can simply call these “bads”. A sensible tax policy would entail taxing “bads” instead of “goods”. Today we have it backwards, with the bulk of the federal tax burden, (95%) falling on taxing “goods” like labor and investment, instead of “bads” like resource depletion, waste and pollution.
Some will argue that such a system would be regressive and punish those that can least afford it. However, this system can be combined with a monthly federal stipend of a couple of hundred dollars for every single man, woman and child in the country to make the system progressive. In this scenario, those who save energy and resources, make money, and those that waste it, pay. Nonetheless, everyone, rich or poor would have a strong incentive not to be wasteful. More importantly, it would eliminate the disincentive to work.
This approach would help solve some of our nation’s largest problems. People would be healthier since the prices we pay for food would reflect the energy and resource intensity of meat vs. produce…thus leading people to consume more produce. We’d start seriously investing in energy efficiency, not because of government mandates, but because it would make financial sense. The approach might even help put our fiscal house in order since it would imply eliminating corporate welfare and all subsidies, including those for clean energy. Market forces would take over without all the loopholes that inevitably skew our personal decisions and ultimately the national economy.
Families would have a strong incentive to save and invest, instead of waste and consume, reversing a century of falling savings rate. It might even help reverse the last 60 years of cultural decay…combating materialism, consumerism, and the decline of the family.
I won’t argue at what level our economy should be taxed. My point is that if we will have any tax what-so-ever, it should not come from the work of; the policeman protecting our streets, the agent insuring our home, or the entrepreneur creating new industries and jobs for society. If nothing can be said to be certain except for death and taxes, then let’s use taxes to help us live longer, richer lives, and leave a world for our children that is not worse off than the one we found.
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This led me to create this site http://www.writegreen.org. Might have to give is 30 seconds or so to load (I've got it hosted on slow Heroku tier) The idea was to empower citizens to use their own philosophy to advocate sustainability with our politicians. The ideas is, change your politicians, not just your light bulbs.