The reason we have so many hidden subsidies (also: tax credits) is precisely the sentence above. It’s the difference between policy and politics. Few policies are designed well because the main force driving their creation is political support (or the lack of it).
The reason why it is not done is because it would lay bare all the inequities in the system, as well as require higher taxes due to not being able to hide the inequities in various forms of price discrimination/segmentation.
Keeping prices obfuscated means costs can be distributed across the population in an unfair manner / benefits reaped in an unfair manner, as well as ability to punt costs into the future.
Is that a common justification for UBI? I have not heard it but it would be a big reasons for me to support it - any reading you know of?
Tax deductions, credits, student loans, subsidized mortgages, taxpayer funded pensions, Medicaid reimbursing differently (lower) than Medicare reimbursing differently than Tricare, and so on and so forth.
It is always a political decision to reduce total costs, or drive the benefit to certain populations, or use liberal assumptions to present future costs as less than they really are and so on and so forth.
If we want people to have a house, give them money to buy a house. Or a house. Same with education, healthcare, everything. The big problem with this is cash has to be accounted for today, transparently, and cleanly. There is no option to muddy the waters.
Openness is a great default, and while I will say a lot of things are more complicated than I know, this will at least drive the discussion into the open.
IIRR Fannie Mae originally had explicit anti-Black lending policies. I do wonder how that would have been dealt with in a more open environment.
The fact is, the utility does not know how much money you cost them in a given month and it's impossible to say. Some of your electricity is being generated from a plant planned and built 40+ years ago, long since paid for. Is that electricity sold at the cost of fuel and maintenance? Electricity generated from a new plant then has a corresponding capital cost component but how's it portioned out at the customer level? What if they had to go change your transformer 20 years ago but your neighbor's still on their old 50-year-old transformer next door?
Unworkable.
There are generators independent from utilities, yet they figured the pricing out somehow.
Then people complain about where will that tax money go. It doesn't matter. The government could burn all the carbon tax money collected (& in fact, this would help against inflation). The purpose is to fix incentives, not find funding
* The "personal responsibility" environmentalists described above
* The "anti-market" environmentalists who assume without evidence that markets necessarily make things worse
* The Green New Deal environmentalists who largely want to use the threat of climate change as political cover for social spending ("climate justice").
The last bullet might be too broad--there might be some GND environmentalists who are sincere, but certainly the overwhelming majority of GND policy and rhetoric seem to be more concerned with social spending than decarbonizing the atmosphere. I think there's a lot of overlap between this group and the prior two groups as well.
Any evidence for this? IMO "Sanctimonious environmentalists" only care that consumption reduces. Whether that's voluntary or due to being priced out by carbon taxes is irrelevant. If anything doing it voluntarily, before it was ever needed to make your household budget work, would make them feel even holier.
And I'm arguing the opposite. In the short-term at least, costs will rise and people will be forced to cut back.
The New York Times said that their article pointing out that (most) recycling has higher environmental costs than landfill attracted the most complaints of any article for at least 10 years.
My old professor doesn't get invited to climate conferences anymore because he ran some serious research into whether geoengineering approaches were feasible.
There is definitely a large constituency of hair-shirt environmentalism that cares more about how much you're suffering for the sacrifices you're making than about how big an actual effect you're having.
The dirty secret is that plenty of technology exists that can actually increase your quality of life while lowering your energy consumption. I'm not just talking about EVs, but electric buses and trains, heat pumps, sealing up drafty houses. But these things require changing how we do things, not necessarily how much we consume of things.
So you're actually incentivized to consume less, because you get more out of it if your tax payments are less than your dividend.
Obviously there might be some perverse incentives to like.. causing a global increase in emissions while keeping your own small somehow but those are probably hard to significantly profit from.
We have a carbon tax in Canada and it's probably not going away any time soon (it is, in fact, scheduled to continue going up), so I'm not sure what you mean here. The provinces can do a rebate/dividend if they want and/or run their own system designed that way but I'm not sure if any have.
I'm not sure if your first statement is just saying we abandoned a rebate, but your last statement implies you think any consumer carbon pricing is impossible regardless of that, while your example says otherwise.