Re:Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0
by snowwrestler on Thursday July 30, 2020 @02:29AM
(#23995273)
The basic problem with funding a universal income with a carbon tax is that the graphs are pointing in the opposite directions.
Population is going up, and inflation is carefully managed to be persistently slightly positive, so you'll need to grow the nominal size of the UBI fund every year. But taxing carbon emissions will result in decreasing carbon emissions; in fact, this is the entire purpose of taxing it! So your revenue from taxes will go down as your outlays go up.
Philosophically, a universal basic income is intended to be a "forever" government program, like Social Security or Medicare. In contrast, we hope to bring our carbon emissions down dramatically and keep them down. Funding a forever program with a revenue source we hope goes away does not seem like good long-term planning to me.
Population is going up, and inflation is carefully managed to be persistently slightly positive, so you'll need to grow the nominal size of the UBI fund every year. But taxing carbon emissions will result in decreasing carbon emissions; in fact, this is the entire purpose of taxing it! So your revenue from taxes will go down as your outlays go up.
Philosophically, a universal basic income is intended to be a "forever" government program, like Social Security or Medicare. In contrast, we hope to bring our carbon emissions down dramatically and keep them down. Funding a forever program with a revenue source we hope goes away does not seem like good long-term planning to me.