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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

I've got a twist on this basic idea.

Fund basic income with a large tax on various CO2 producing activities. With the idea that - on average - people can pay this tax out of the basic income received from it. And people will have direct incentives to find ways to reduce CO2 consumption. Then get rid of silly specific legislation that tries to achieve the same goal in less successful ways. Thus fuel efficiency, California's attempts at cap-and-trade, incentives for renewable energy - all should become unnecessary.

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See Australian politics for clues on why that probably won't be an attractive option for politicians where you are. We implemented a carbon tax. While not perfect, it's a pretty decent stab IMO, yet is very easy to demonise and as such is wildly unpopular with hoi polloi.

It's a real pity that many good legislative ideas seem to be susceptible to simplistic populist attack if you yell loud enough.

> It's a real pity that many good legislative ideas seem to be susceptible to simplistic populist attack if you yell loud enough.

I'm having trouble finding it now (so please take it with a grain of salt), but I remember once reading a quote by a southern US politician in the 1950s that went something like: "I used to talk about paving roads and better schools and no one listened. Then I started pounding tables about [black people] and suddenly everyone supported me."

Similarly, Joe McCarthy (of McCarthyism fame) was a pretty unremarkable Senator for his first three years in office. Then one day, he claimed he had a list of known Communists working in the State department, and the next day he was a household name.

Populism has always been a really easy way for politicians to drum up fervent support. A shame that it rarely ever solves any problems.

I've been struggling with this concept for a while. How can we have an effective democracy when it's so easy for stupid, essentially malicious, but persuasive-sounding "political memes" to infect the working classes and derail processes which are actually in the country's interest?

I still don't know the answer but realising that the media were actually part of the effective bureaucracy was a revelation.

We've been lucky, for a long time, that the media has basically done the right thing for the good of the country. Collectively, they are in charge. They slip up every now and again, giving air time to toxic memes like the carbon tax thing, and of course the example you raised - McCarthy suddenly got traction because he comes bearing gifts of news. But generally it's been not too bad.

I hope we remain lucky.

Your suggestion has the same problems as most basic income proposals.

1) The numbers don't work out. Even a very steep CO2 tax will produce too little revenue for any form of meaningful BI.

2) The money collected on the CO2 tax could also be used for a general tax cut. So you still have the political problem of explaining to working middle class why their money is being handed out to lazy bums.

1) There are increasingly few people in the middle class

2) Very few poor people are lazy bums, in my experience. There "lazy bums" are also sometimes the people creating amazing music, Wikipedia, or other valuable (and un-monetized) cultural products

3) The author didn't specify a time period, simply that given the capital > labor trend, a BI will be necessary if we don't want absolute and complete inequality

1) The numbers don't work out. Even a very steep CO2 tax will produce too little revenue for any form of meaningful BI.

The USA currently consumes about 450 billion gallons of petroleum products per year, which is about 1.5 trillion pounds. We also mine about a billion short tons of coal per year, which is 2 trillion pounds. We have about 300 million people.

Taxing $0.75/pound on carbon fuels would generate a bit over $6k/year per man, woman and child. That's $4.5/gallon. This is enough to put a family of 4 at about $25K/year in basic income, which is just above the poverty line this year.

There is enough revenue. You just have to accept a higher tax.

The middle class receives the money as well. This kind of program - where everyone pays and everyone receives - has proven very popular in the past. See social security for a demonstration.

Your carbon tax of $1500/ton of carbon is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than any proposed carbon tax. Proposals are for $20/ton to reduce greehouse gas emissions to targets. Estimates of the social cost of carbon dioxide range from $50 to $200 per ton.

The level that I suggested is not out of line with what is already accepted as customary in many European countries. And the net impact on most would be minimal because the cost is returned fairly directly to the people paying it.

This idea seems to incur very high bureaucracy costs. What are CO2 producing activies? How much are each of them taxed? Who measures the tax and is responsible paying for it? Etc.

One selling point of basic income is that there's no loopholes and there's very little bureaucracy costs, therefore a larger portion of the money is actually used for consumption instead of doing unnecessary (for society) work.

Of course there are details to work out but it is fundamentally a solvable problem. A tax on any coal natural gas or oil should cover most of the bases (per ton of carbon contained). If it is being purchased for a use that won't end up in the atmosphere (IE carbon capture and storage), the burden is on the purchaser to prove the case for a tax write-off.

I don't think there's a reason to couple a CO2 tax to basic income. You can create a CO2 tax separately from basic income, as it has enough opponents as it is.

I suggested coupling them because I was looking for something that fits, "Solve as many problems with one go as possible, getting rid of as much legislation as possible."

If you create a significant CO2 tax separately from some specific program, like basic income, the fear is that it will be (and will seen to be) just a general supplement on government spending. Which has a tendency to grow until it cannot, so you're just putting off an inevitable crunch that we're already bumping up against.

But if you tie them together, the pain of the tax is balanced by the pleasure of the income. And people have been shown to enjoy that sort of thing. Witness the popularity of tax refunds, even though getting one is strictly worse for you than not getting one.

95%+ of CO2-producing activities come from two sources: coal, and petroleum products such as gas and diesel. Pretty easy to tax those. I've written more about that here: http://shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/11123583304/solving-global...

You don't need to tax actual CO2-producing activities. You just tax the production of CO2-containing fuels. The price is passed on to the buyer who produces CO2 with them.

You can then offer tax credits for CO2 capturing (with the burden of proof on the claimant).

You want to couple one controversial idea (basic income) with another controversial idea (global climate change)? Yikes!

Climate change is not a controversial idea. It is widely accepted idea.

Climate Change is not a controversial idea in the scientific community, but it is still a controversial idea in mainstream politics. Sadly.

Neat idea! but I'd prefer we change one systemic variable at a time so we can account for the results...

I'm not sure this makes sense.

Consider a tower of blocks with two legs, of equal height, and a problem that the tower is too short. If you lengthen one of the legs and not the other, the tower tips over. But that's not a necessary result of the tower being taller; it's a result of the tower being off balance. If you lengthen both legs by the same amount, the tower stands.

You can of course argue that tower height and tower balance are the systemic variables, with length of tower legs being incidental - and this is a perfectly reasonable point of view, but how would you propose we determine how to draw those lines in public policy? If we're free to draw them wherever we please, discussion by discussion, this seems like a fully general counterargument (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Fully_general_counterargument) against any potential change: we can't raise the height of the tower, because that involves lengthening both legs, and I prefer to change one thing at a time; we can't lengthen one of the legs, because that changes height and balance and I prefer to change one thing at a time.

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