Another alternative is flat consumption taxes on climate damaging products combined with general wealth taxation and cash redistribution to lower the impact on low income/wealth households.
The beauty of this is that now you can add astronomical consumption taxes, and just plow the increased revenue into the guaranteed income pool. On average, the consumption tax is revenue neutral for the government, and (as a percentage of income) disproportionately goes to the poor.
Also, you can eliminate 99% of the US tax accounting industry, food stamp program administration, and all sorts of other bureaucracies.
So-called progressive taxes are always regressive in practice, at least in the US. Keeping the math simple makes it easy to keep them honest. (Make the marginal rate 40-50% if you want. Just set the base income so that the middle class is paying 33%.)
Is there cross-country comparative empirical evidence for that? My hunch is that very obscure tax curves (trapezoids and what not with layers of ad hoc edge cases) are vulnerable to meddling. But I doubt there's a general meddle-ability difference between simple forms of progressivity vs flat.
In my own country we see significant proportions of multi-generational welfare demographics that are incentivized to breed and often with multiple children, because someone else picks up the tab. However the working class who that try to get ahead under their own steam before maybe breeding are having children later, and less of them if at all.
This is almost always a racial slur that turns out not to be true on closer inspection.
So racist against white people I guess?
The states most strongly against a welfare state invariably receive the most welfare.
See also: Attempts to repeal Obamacare without infuriating the parts of the Republican base that are most loudly calling for a repeal.
From the POV of climate destruction the segments that don't plan so well, or to put it more bluntly, who plan and act so badly that they're strongly disproportionately responsible for the problem are those that the progressive consumption tax (and general wealth taxation) adresses: the wealthiest.
US style welfare provisions have three flaws at the same time. It is (1) not generous enough to escape the costly everyday scarcity tax* (2) spiked with time-wasting conditions and bureaucratic procedures and (3) politically and socially stigmatized. The US should transition to the northern european welfare state model which works better in all those three regards.
* https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/scientificam...