Instead of cheques to fight climate change, billionaires should just pay taxes

Using tax policy to push corporations and their billionaire founders/executives/shareholders to change their behavior might be the more rational strategy. For example, elimination of tax breaks for the fossil fuel sector:

> "The intangible drilling cost deduction (which expenses as opposed to capitalizes certain drilling costs) has been around for over 100 years, and the percentage depletion allowance (15% reduction in gross income of a productive well) has also been around nearly that long. (Forbes)"

This discourages investment in fossil fuels, and of course transferring the tax breaks to the renewable industry would encourage growth in that sector.

Similarly, if we went back to 1960s corporate tax rates (50% top tier), well, corporations avoided those high rates by getting deductions for their massive R&D efforts (see Bell Labs etc.). If we want technological development, encouraging large-scale private sector R&D makes sense (see China's technological development history).

Such policies don't necessarily increase government revenue but they do push corporate behavioral changes and technological development.

"Bezos lives largely tax free, even though he's one of the richest men in the history of the world"

It's a ridiculous assertion. Easy to check that this is not true.

Jeff Bezos sold $10's of billions of Amazon stock in 2020 and 2021.[1] Of COURSE he paid taxes on that.

So he's personally paid billions in taxes in a single year. This makes this story based on something that is not true.

You'd think the CBC would do fact checking.

[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/amzn/insider-a...

I find this discourse incredibly frustrating. I don't like billionaires, and I would prefer they give away their money more rapidly. But they are following that laws that exist just as much as the rest of us. We don't expect people to voluntarily pay higher taxes than required, and that would be a ridiculous way of running a government.

It's stupid to say they are "not paying their taxes", because in fact, as a policy, our government has chosen not to tax them. If people disagree with that policy, they should focus their ire on government, not on billionaires.

And are governments doing as much as they can?

In Canada we have a government that constantly talks about climate change yet does nothing. Emissions keep going up. Rich that an article like this comes from the CBC...

This is just yet another “tax the rich” op-ed dressed up to seem more meaningful than it is.

Taxes REGULARLY go towards things that will not help the climate.

If I remember correctly, US taxpayers (and implicitly everyone who uses USD even via reserve currency basket) paid 2.3 trillion dollars for the war in Afghanistan.

My point is that no amount of tax money would fix problem of irrational spending of it (if you measure rationally from whole humanity benefit vs few elites).

Honestly the money would probably go towards diversity training and CRT, not towards the climate, so I don’t see any value in taxing the rich

I trust the billionaires more than I trust governments. Which doesn't mean that I trust billionaires.

I disagree. Billionaires nor anyone else should not pay any more taxes than they can get away with legally. That's just charity. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/31/david-...

Instead, they should document how they did it, then flaunt it publicly with paid ads and name the politicians and regulations that make it possible. Just keep flaunting until angry people demand that loopholes are closed and laws are changed.

Maybe just tax carbon emissions?

Surely the CBC, a state-run news outlet and beneficiary of over $1B of annual tax dollars, can be trusted to provide a balanced, impartial view of who should be taxed, how much, and where those dollars should be spent.

Nice, more money for the police.

Yeah because the government is known for allocating money where it's needed. War.

I see that often we tax the rich in order to pass their money along to lobbyists who take that money and use it for projects that exacerbate the climate crisis. In California, a lot of tax dollars go to dirty energy. Think of Newsom’s ties with PG&E and big oil. It’s a lot like money laundering and muddies what could and should be a fairly simple discussion about how we get our energy. Another example is Biden pushing opec and other nations to pump more oil. Or when he says he is pro-fracking to one group and says he is anti-fracking to another group a few days later. As long as the public votes for more of this, I think our hope must reside outside the political industrial complex. It’s more likely that someone like Musk will solve big problems than the government would using his money. Look at spacex.

How about carbon tax?