We got the swindle from the start

Carbon Taxes: A Letter from Canada 

By PETER SHAWN TAYLOR February 8, 2019 6:30 AM

Promises of revenue neutrality don’t survive contact with the real world. Hey America, It’s Canada, your friendly neighbor to the north. You might remember us — there’s a big white wall between our properties. But only in winter. 

Anyway, we couldn’t help but notice you seem to be having a bit of bother over carbon taxes these days.  At the risk of intruding, we thought we might offer a few neighborly observations. You see, we’ve had the same issue in our house for a few years now. On your side of the fence, the Climate Leadership Council’s plan — recently backed by 27 Nobel Prize–winning economists and other economic luminaries — calls for a nationwide tax starting at $40 a ton on carbon dioxide emissions, on efficiency grounds. (All figures in U.S. dollars.) It vows that “the majority of American families . . . will benefit financially by receiving more in ‘carbon dividends’ than they pay in increased energy prices.”  

A tax that pays you sure sounds appealing! But a word of caution: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Up here in Canada, we’ve been burned by the same promise. Back in 2008, the province of British Columbia similarly proposed a carbon tax in the interests of economic efficiency and as a way to reduce greenhouse gases. The government promised that “every dollar raised will be returned to the people of B.C. in the form of lower taxes.” And for the first few years, it was true to its word. Tax revenue from the carbon tax was used to lower personal and corporate income-tax rates — and economists everywhere lauded the concept. A joint study by Duke University and the University of Ottawa declared B.C.’s plan to be “textbook policy.”  

Then politics happened. After a few years, the B.C. government discovered that tiny annual cuts to personal and corporate tax rates weren’t as politically rewarding as originally thought. So, it switched to spending its carbon-tax revenues on higher-profile subsidy programs like film- and television-production tax credits. By 2013, the program ceased to be revenue neutral. And following a change in government in 2017, all carbon-tax revenue is now funneled straight into general revenues. B.C. taxpayers are thus the victims of a decade-long betrayal. Having agreed to a carbon tax based on the promise of strict revenue neutrality, they find that their so-called textbook carbon tax has become just another garden-variety government tax grab. Then again, maybe your Congress is more trustworthy than our parliaments . . .

The letter by  27 economists liars went no where, was soundly rejected immediately for the cause just mentioned.   It is not happening here in the USA, and in California the taxes are used to increase global warming via built in energy guarantees everywhere.  The stops are in place by our Venezuelan legislators which insures that all energy taxes are used to increase global warming. 

It is, was and always will be a mathematically proven swindle, there is no ying for the yang.  The proceeds must go to the individuals who consume the smallest energy foot print. We have known that, it is the one thing economists ever got right, supply and demand.  (got the law right, but someone else had to do the math for them).

But, we know, the people know, the swindle is called off, Gavin will need to tax wealthy liberals, sorry.  As far as environmentalists out here, they will always waste energy with their stupid experiments, we just have to write off the global warming cost.