It’s probably really hard to determine the cost of pollution and other things. I suspect sugar producers and fast food companies would look really bad
A good to know is California has some programs where they will buy back your older vehicle and pay you a grant of you replace it with a new or used low emissions vehicle. You can also get public transit vouchers instead I think.
Note. Low emissions includes hybrids. And some used EV's are really affordable.
Go to electric. What about the environmental impact on battery creation/recycling/maintenance? Or the electricity to power them (until nuclear comes online)?
This line of argumentation can go on endlessly. How about instead let’s reduce taxes and try focusing on lowering the cost of living for middle and lower income brackets.
Doesn’t New York City do this with a soda tax?
What happens when taxes are so high, we have an egress of businesses from regions within the US causing collapse of local communities like saw with Detroit?
The point is, when navigating a highly dimensional design space it's ok to use a gradient descent / greedy optimization approach. If step 1 works then proceed to step 2, if step 1 did not work then we learned something and can pick a different step. Fix whatever went wrong in making the mistake with picking step 1 as the current top priority. It makes no sense to say that we can't make step 1 because step 1001 might be bad.
On the point of taxation, I personally dislike tax precisely because I think the money is not allocated in anything close to priority order. If it was we would be living in a vastly different world.
Like you just magically saying "let's cut taxes and reduce cost of living"?
>we have an egress of businesses from regions within the US causing collapse of local communities like saw with Detroit?
If all you're worried about is big business, don't worry. They already leaving. Communities are already collapsing. And we voted for it, so hey. Democracy works right?
We’re at an incredible deficit as a nation, interest alone on that deficit outpacing defense spending.
Creating additional taxes, which will potentially slow growth/gdp, will only harm our efforts to resolve our woeful financial situation as a nation. Additional taxes further pushes business out of the country, leading to a spiral to insolvency.
Californian’s should be asking, where do these taxes go? Not to solving homelessness or violent crime. Not to resolving catastrophic water issues (reservoirs drying up), or fixing brownouts across the region.
And you haven’t addressed how you’re going to get people to stop using oil without taxes.
>How about instead let’s reduce taxes and try focusing on lowering the cost of living for middle and lower income brackets.
Oh don't worry, Musk is getting a huge tax cut.