I don't live in France anymore but in the village that I used to live in which was 40km from Paris, the rent for a decent size apartment i.e, not a broom closet was around 700 euros per month.
Many people in France make less than 1800 euros per month.
Which means that in the best case scenario they are left with 1k euro before any basic necessities such as food, electricity, water insurance, phone bill and what not.
The result is that the end of the month they got nothing or barely anything.
So what do people do, they move further away so they can save a few hundred euros in rent, even if that means paying more for fuel because they just want to live a little not just survive!
And guess what, there is a reason that the rent is lower further away from Paris. The reason is that there are no trains, very little buses, so where does that leave those people, they are stuck!
Yet the government comes around and says, you guys are polluting? Well Fk me, what do you want those people to do about it, they just want to survive!
Do you think people are actually waking up in the morning and saying: "Today I am going to spend 60euros to fill up my tank and I am just going to drive in circles for hours to screw up the climate!"
The governments have known about climate change for DECADES, now that it's actually threatening the economies of the world, they decided to react by making people pay their own lack of foresight?
As always, the little guy is getting shafted while the biggest polluters in this world, the freighters, and the airline companies are spared. And for what?
If the problem is the poorest, why not use the fuel duty raised to help them? They're surely not using all the fuel, so this could be a net benefit to them.
The problem I have is that those incentives are driving people to kill themselves as they cannot afford to live anymore. I guess that's what the government wants though, less pollution.
Can't pollute if your dead.
Better yet to build electric vehicle infrastructure (trains, trams, charging stations - cheap compared to housing) which could also be used by some business, tax non-train freight. Replace buses with electric ones.
Farming cannot be done in the middle of the city and you probably do not want factories there either... Your move would likely kill the remaining parts of this business if successful.
Which is why I added the other paragraph.
If rents go down, the poor get to pay less to landlords. If gas prices go down, the poor have to pay more to oil companies (because it "allows" them to live further away) and spend more of their lives commuting. Which policy actually helps the poor, which one helps the oil companies?
Moreover, the best way to do a carbon tax is to just give the money back to people -- use it to fund a UBI. Then the amount can be as high as you want because the higher you make the tax, the more progressive it is, because it increases the amount of the UBI. Let corporations pay more for diesel with the money going to individuals. Paying $900/month in additional fuel tax to get $1000/month in UBI would be great for the poor. Not so much for the oil companies.
If you and some other country are producing food for the same cost (e.g. because you pay more for an hour of labor but have better automation), adding the same cost to each doesn't affect your competitiveness. You both still have the same costs as each other.
The same amount of fuel tax only affects you differently if you require a different amount of fuel to produce the same amount of food. Then the party using less fuel has the advantage and may end up producing more food while the party using more fuel produces less. But that's what we want to happen -- having the other country produce food in that case is the desired outcome, because it can do it for lower cost once the externalities of burning carbon are priced in.
And the local transport costs are identical between local and export farmer, while local production is more expensive on labor and fuel.
The only thing to do is to raise duties on food and... it is risky politically. Alternatively, subsidize much more. Good luck!
Solution: If the carbon tax for the product's production and transportation is not collected by the country of origin, it is collected by customs on import.
> And the local transport costs are identical between local and export farmer, while local production is more expensive on labor and fuel.
If it's more expensive on labor, it was the whole time. If it uses more fuel, discouraging it is the intended outcome.
It really depends on where the tipping point is, country X might have a slight advantage but measures like this can widen the gap, then secondary factors like economies of scale kick in.
> If both countries impose a carbon tax in the same amount, nothing about that has changed.
Most international agreements are (rightfully) trying to give developing countries a reprieve and let the developed ones shoulder must of the short term burden for the renewable transition. But it's happening at the same time that we're reducing tariffs and developing countries get a double advantage while the working class in developed nations get a kick in the guts.
> Moreover, the best way to do a carbon tax is to just give the money back to people -- use it to fund a UBI
I'm all for both, but using a carbon tax to fund UBI would invert the incentive, governments would want companies polluting more to fund their welfare commitments. We see the same with high cigarette taxes, the government gets dependent on them for general revenue.
For most markets with behaviors like that you're already doomed, because the other country will figure it out and borrow some money so they can operate temporarily at a loss or convince the government to provide temporary subsidies until they achieve the economies of scale. More likely a marginal cost increase would only result in a marginal reduction in demand.
Notice also that this is the exact argument used against anything that increases costs on local businesses. France might have some candidate regulations nearer to the front of the line than the carbon tax if they were actually interested in taking that seriously.
> Most international agreements are (rightfully) trying to give developing countries a reprieve and let the developed ones shoulder must of the short term burden for the renewable transition.
But then it's doing what it's supposed to do. Why volunteer for a burden and then complain when it comes?
> But it's happening at the same time that we're reducing tariffs and developing countries get a double advantage while the working class in developed nations get a kick in the guts.
Which is why all the money should be going to a UBI.
> I'm all for both, but using a carbon tax to fund UBI would invert the incentive, governments would want companies polluting more to fund their welfare commitments. We see the same with high cigarette taxes, the government gets dependent on them for general revenue.
This is a generic anti-tax argument. If the government collected tax revenues from American tech companies, they would become dependent on the money and become unwilling to resist their privacy invasions, therefore they should subject all those companies to no taxes.
The thing about that argument in this case is that it only applies as long as the carbon tax exists, which will make it continue to exist, which is good. Moreover, the easiest way for the government to placate recipients and give them more money isn't to get people to burn more oil (which is pretty hard if you're taxing it heavily), it's to raise the carbon tax rate. Which is also good.
At some point people will actually stop burning oil and the UBI would have to be funded some other way if you want to keep it, but so what? Having that problem implies having solved the original one. And having a population that has seen the benefits of a UBI and wants to continue having it seems like a pretty good problem to have too.
Poland cannot afford 200 PLN (about $60) if we put the whole budget into this which is impossible. It gets strained even with child bonus...
Those are back off the envelope calculations and an unfixable problem.
If you introduce a cutoff it's no longer universal and you still probably cannot afford it.
This is also why a cut off saves you nothing. If the person at the 85th percentile would have been paying $2000 in tax and receiving a $1000 UBI, and you eliminate their UBI so that they only pay $1000 in tax, zero real difference has been made to anyone. A phase out only changes anything if the nominal tax reduction it allows goes to a different income level than the people subject to the phase out -- but if that's what you wanted, you could do it by just changing their respective tax rates to begin with. Which is a lot easier to reason about, so that you don't do dumb stuff like impose a 35% UBI phase out plus a 25% marginal tax rate (effectively a 60% marginal tax rate) on middle income people, while charging a lower tax rate to higher income people.
More to the point, the context here is using a carbon tax to fund the UBI, which makes the point succinctly. If the average person is paying $100/month in carbon tax, it funds a $100/person/month UBI. A carbon tax is quite regressive -- more even than sales tax -- but the UBI is at least as anti-regressive, so it cancels. The only difference it makes is to the people with a higher or lower than average carbon footprint, so it gives everyone the incentive to be on the below average side, which is exactly the purpose.
This is a very good argument for higher carbon taxes -- they would make the shipped item more expensive.
And if transported goods are much cheaper than locally produced even after paying a transportation cost including taxes, then maybe it's time for some producers to try something else. Or to convince the government that there's a value in producing food in that specific area and get more subsidies.
It's the suburban wastelands that are saturated with families of daily-driven automobiles and commuters.
I live in a rural area, most of my neighbors only drive to a grocery store ~10 miles away once a week. The rest of the time is spent at home.
Then on the weekends a bunch of city folks blast through disrupting everything on their way to/from Las Vegas and/or to hike in the national park. It's absolutely nuts, the small town becomes a microcosm of LA via weekend tourism, every weekend.
The rural folks I know are mostly poor, they can't afford to be burning fossil fuels like it's going out of style. They live relatively frugal lives, they're not the problem.