A work-from-home tax [pdf]

Instead of penalizing change, why not encourage it? When you work from home, you don't put anywhere near the carbon into the atmosphere that you would commuting. You also spend a lot less on lunch, and you don't need to put your children into state-run schools that are really there to function as daycare centers as much as they are to educate. If all of that office space in downtown areas stays dark, and the zoning laws are altered or removed, it can be redeveloped into housing that's actually affordable.

We really are running into a wall on the methane crisis, and we we simply don't have the time to integrate these changes at a slower pace.

Let's focus on changing our regulations that prohibit building neighborhoods for pedestrians. Let's work on getting homes with solar roofs and big batteries. Let's get drone delivery everywhere. Let's electrify the transport system with electric cars, electric trucks, eVTOL aircraft. Let's tunnel underneath and between cities and connect them with hyperloops. Let's connect people in rural areas with low-cost, low-latency satellite internet access.

Doing these things will directly provide a great number of jobs for a great number of people. It will make a great number of new jobs possible. It will improve the natural environment. I think this is a much more positive direction to take than to try to slow things down.

Deutsche Bank probably has several billion dollars in loans with commercial buildings as collateral. Back to work, dammit!

Oh dear. At a time when we humans absolutely must figure out how to consume fewer resources — taxing people for consuming fewer resources seems like a wildly perverse incentive.

They are just too invested in gambling with German real restate. Would be really bad if housing became affordable again! My counter-proposal: Deutsche Bank is one of the most evil German banks, let's just tax them and all of their employees into oblivion, impound their assets and then prohibit that gambling business model alltogether.

I do not understand why this stupid idea is given so much publicity.

That makes absolutely no sense. Rather, WFH and greatly reduced air travel helps CO2 emissions. Should taxes be used to finance simulation of a pre-covid economy? What to do with the money anyway when the state can and does issue bonds at negative interest?

It’s as if DB want to be hated even more. Is their business model tied to doing the most evil things possible?

It's a dynamic system though. Sure, I spend less on transport - but on the other hand, the transport system sees less wear and tear (just an example).

I spend less on restaurant foods, but I spend more on groceries. So while one part is losing, another is gaining.

Obviously these are not - or even anywhere near - a 1:1 ratio. The money I save on fuel, is not spent 100% on something else. But it's not like everything I save from WFH goes directly to my savings account - there are things I spend more money on now.

The largest saving, IMO, comes from the commute itself. The time saved is fabulous - and really makes you think how much time is wasted on commuting. 2 x 15 mins a day for roughly 240 days, that's 120 hours...or 3 full 40-hour weeks! And 15 mins is pretty damn nice to begin with, imagine those that have to commute 1-2 hours every day.

When you have put the economy into the deep freezer for the better part of a year and consequently committed to paying everyone their wages (or more) for that year, things become desperate enough that you have to contemplate things like this. Of course a lot of people will just give up on remote work and return to the status quo, and then of course, to save the environment, these very same people will be taxed more! There's no winning either way, it seems!

dupe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055465

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074129

This is very bank centric. I don't buy clothes for work. And i don't go to restaurants for lunch so my food bill has gone UP now working from home.

And some bike to work so no savings there.