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Comment by skhunted | Hacker News Reader

From the perspective of wanting less waste and less pollution tariffs are a good thing.

Why do you say that? Without tariffs, the most efficient producer makes the good or service. With them, someone less efficient may make them.

Efficiency includes, but isn't only, waste and pollution.

By waste I meant the consuming of goods and accompanying trash that comes with it.

How is that made better by tariffs? Do you mean the increased prices will reduce consumption, which will reduce the accompanying waste?

Yes.

Sure but that seems more a clever side-effect than a real policy?

Outcomes are more important than "real policy".

Real policy is about real outcomes; this idea, while interesting to talk about, fails on outcomes.

Hasn’t been implemented so how do you know the outcomes won’t be there? Real policy as you call often times fails to have intended outcome or has lots of unintended consequences.

> Hasn’t been implemented so how do you know the outcomes won’t be there?

That's not a serious policy analysis, or even much of a debate exercise.

Efficiency includes also e.g. child and slave labor.

You could say the same about progressive taxes. Without them, the most efficient do the work. With them, less efficient people below taxable income threshold will do more work.

That's the first valuable, novel insight I've heard about taxation in a long time. While I support progressive taxes for other reasons (fairness), I'd be interested in the economic impact.

(The research would have to use overall tax rate, not just 'income' tax (i.e., wage tax).)

There was a time before income tax… and there maybe a future without income tax. Or you can think of income tax as profit sharing with everyone’s required partner big brother. Remember corporate tax and payroll taxes are flat. the progressive part of income tax is really more targeted at consumption. so it’s really more of a progressive consumption tax. It’s easy to arrange a delay in taxes if you don’t need to consume, and are willing to run a business.

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