Hacker News Reader

Comment by sanxiyn | Hacker News Reader

I am not familiar with US politics, but looking at your link, the bill is sponsored by 58 Democrats and 1 Republicans. Is it a usual practice to describe such bills as bipartisan?

View on HN

The goal of the bill is bipartisan support. What makes the bill bipartisan is it does not attempt to grow government by creating new tax revenues, or regulations. Instead of increasing tax revenue the carbon fee is paid directly to the tax payer. Instead of additional regulations the gradually increasing fee incentivizes industry to reduce their use of fossil fuels.

So your claim is that it is bipartisan ideologically, not procedurally, right?

But I don't think that Republicans actually follow their own ideology of minimal state.

Anyway, I think the bill is a good idea (not an American).

I'm not sure what you mean by "procedurally." Republicans can still vote in favor of this bill even if they do not cosponsor it. But the more Republicans cosponsor it the easier it will be politically for other Republicans to vote in favor of it.

What would a partisan bill look like?

Is the other party not allowed to vote for one such bill?

The word you are looking for is non-partisan. Bi-partisan means it currently has broad support in both parties. You can't say a bill is bi-partisan if it doesn't actually have that support. Saying you have a goal of bi-partisan support doesn't make the bill bi-partisan. Otherwise, bill proponent could claim the goal of any bill is to be bi-partisan which makes every bill bi-partisan.

Call it what you’d like.

It seems it would have a better claim to being bipartisan if the higher taxes on carbon fuels came with a relaxation of efficiency regulations rather than just adding on top.

Good question. Republicans in particular need to worry about primary challenges in their science-illiterate districts, and many may be wary of attaching their name to this directly. But there are a good handful of deep red congresspeople who are happy to discuss policy details around carbon pricing, even if they can't politically afford cosponsorship [0]. I imagine that several of those may be willing to vote for such a bill. This is why it's particularly important to write to conservative lawmakers – most of them understand that this makes economic sense, but citizens have to demonstrate to them that they won't lose votes over this kind of legislation.

Also, consider that if Democrats gain control of the Senate in 2020, they can pass this easily, and once such a fee-and-dividend scheme is around for a few years, it will likely become very popular with citizens (because of the dividends [1]) and big business (because of the predictability, compared to regulations/bans/subsidies/political favoritism [2]), so it won't be easy to get rid of it again. Instead, the battleground will shift, as we currently see in Canada, to "how fast do we increase the price per ton?" and "which industries get special treatment?".

[0] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/climate-solutions-caucus/

[1] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/household-impact-study/

[2] https://www.clcouncil.org/

The real question is why all government fines aren't structured this way.

You could restructure all externalities taxes to pay a dividend back out of what they raise, but you could instead skip a step and use the money to reduce the amount you need to raise via other taxes. Presumably your general-purpose tax is structured some way that's more efficient than having everyone to pay an equal share, so this is a more efficient option.

But if externalities taxes + dividends are politically expedient then so be it. It sure beats never regulating externalities.

> Also, consider that if Democrats gain control of the Senate in 2020, they can pass this easily

Yes, they can, which should really get people thinking if they don’t. Republicans don’t care about this stuff and readily admit it, but Democrats seem to only care a lot if they don’t have power to do anything. Once they are in control, this kind of heavy impact bills don’t get passed either, and best we get is something like plastic straw ban.

Republicans aren't science-illiterate. Spreading that myth is a great way to have people immediately tune out from listening to your remaining arguments.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/03/28/what-american...

No, it's not. In fact, bills which actually want to be bipartisan often go out of their way to make around half of the original, top-line sponsors from each party.

Where we are at in the US is that TODAY dozens of right-wing, White-supremacist supporters of the president have traveled to a town they believe is not supportive enough of his politics and have openly declared that they are going to assault people on the streets, and the President has responded by offering an oblique blessing. There’s no such thing as bipartisan.

Reality, meet thy opposite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com