Hacker News Reader

Comment by hellbannedguy | Hacker News Reader

This will hit poor, and low middle class, the hardest.

We are barely getting by as it is.

The poor don't have the luxury of buying new fuel efficient, or electric cars. Our roads are not safe for motorcycles 365 days out of the year. They buy what will get them to work and back hopefully, at a price that won't put them further into debt.

My biggest fear with Global Warming is they make the poor pay for it in sneaky ways.

When smog checks were required in CA, they made it sound like the low income wouldn't be hit hard financially. It didn't turn out that way though. If your vechicle doesn't pass increasing harder smog tests every two years; you end up paying a lot. (I can work on my own vechicles, but thinking about buying a smoke machine because they are now failing for tiny holes where hydrocarbons might escape.)

View on HN

The assumption is that the tax money would be redistributed to low earners on a monthly basis, much like the child tax credit works now. That way the poor aren't affected and rich bear much of the burden, which makes sense since they also do most of the polluting.

Do the rich do most of the polluting by buying gas though? I am middle class and work from home. I pollute by having a lot of things delivered. Consumption tax shifts the burden to the person delivering things to me, who is probably poorer than I am.

Isn't this the standard argument against consumption taxes?

The person delivering to you will either raise their price, affecting you indirectly, or be subsidized directly by the tax rebate.

The person delivering to me has no power to set prices. That is decided by the management at the delivering company.

Sure they do. Your pizza delivery driver won't take that job if they lose money on the gas. Then the pizza place has to either raise their rate or cover their gas, which they would then pass on to you as an increased delivery fee.

Pushing the consumption tax to the bottom squeezes the delivery driver’s margin more than the business’.

Shifting the cost onto the delivery service is actually good. Pretty much all delivery is done by a few large companies. The only exception are things like Grubhub/Doordash which put the fuel costs on the individual worker. A fuel tax across the board would no doubt just result in a price increase that would compensate the drivers since it would be a uniform tax.

Outside of specific areas where gig services are regulated - using things like Grubhub/Uber. does cause harm to the poorer, worker because after accounting for costs and vehicle depreciation the profit is less than minimum wage. I would not be surprised if the profit is negative part of the time. The way to not cause this harm is to not use these services e.g. make your own food at home.

Deliveries would just get more expensive if fuel got more expensive.

And I consider delivery to be basic infrastructure that’s the backbone of everything from small Etsy shops to Amazon to B2B shipping, so I wouldn’t want delivery prices to go up.

A Carbon Dividend fueled by a carbon VAT tax...

Is this a safe assumption? The majority of our federal budget is spent on social security, health care (more than half on 65 and over), and defense. According to this research, only 8% was spent on safety net programs in 2019: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/where-do-our-fe...

I'm saying the assumption when someone says, "increase the gas tax" is that such a system is only viable if a subsidy for the poor is part of it.

I think one could make the case that social security, Medicare and Medicaid are safety net programs. That said, I don’t think that means these taxes would necessarily go to help the poor.

Edit - bad spellcheck edit

The rich do most of the polluting? How can that possibly be true given the rich are a tiny minority of the population.

They outsource the polluting. Their capital funds operations that generate pollution.

A carbon tax would be the most efficient ways to reducing CO2 emissions. It's a far simpler system than trying to work out average average emissions for different fleets of vehicles, never mind trying to balance competing CO2 production coming from various industries, agriculture and transportation. Complicated laws make for loopholes and massive inefficiencies as technology and the economy changes. We should tax precisely the thing we want to reduce.

This is assuming you're actually on board with mainstream science and the problems associated with anthropogenic climate change. If you think climate change is a hoax or harmless, then yeah any carbon tax is a drain on the economy with no upside.

We are barely getting by as it is.

Okay, that's the problem. People need more equitable access to opportunity and a stronger safety net. Better public or charter schools, or more earned income tax credits or a higher minimum wage or maybe even straight up UBI. All of these are things that might address poverty more effectively than repealing smog laws.

> The poor don't have the luxury of buying new fuel efficient

You don't have to buy more fuel efficient car of the same size. You can just buy a smaller car.

I don’t think so, public transport will flourish to meet the new demand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com