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from the extant-dinosaurs-dealing-in-dead-dinosaurs dept.
Common Dreams reports
Governments are failing to properly tax fossil fuel consumption, with enormous environmental costs, the IMF reports.
The fossil fuel industry receives $5.3 trillion a year in government subsidies, despite its disastrous toll on the environment, human health, and other global inequality issues, a new report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published [May 18] has found.
That means that governments worldwide are spending $10 million every minute to fund energy companies--more than the estimated public health spending for the entire globe, IMF economists Benedict Clements and Vitor Gaspar wrote in a blog post accompanying the report (pdf).
[...]Subsidies occur in two ways, IMF Fiscal Affairs Department directors Sanjeev Gupta and Michael Keen explained in a separate blog post published [May 18]:"[Pre-tax]" subsidies--which occur when people and businesses pay less than it costs to supply the energy--are smaller than a few years back. But "post-tax" subsidies--which add to pre-tax subsidies an amount that reflects the environmental, health and other damage that energy use causes and the benefit from favorable VAT or sales tax treatment--remain extremely high, and indeed are now well above our previous estimates.
[...]If anything, the report's findings are "conservative", Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, told Common Dreams. "[It] doesn't include direct subsidies to fossil fuel producers, and it doesn't include things like the cost of military resources to defend Persian Gulf oil."
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 20 2015, @11:46AM
These people aren't necessarily causing the problem, but they pay disproportionately more for its effects.
Yes we are in agreement so far, and extending your example into the implementation era, the total cost of public victimization divided by the number of residents works out to $1K/yr (just to make the math easy), which they are currently paying. So the .gov will "helpfully" tax everyone an extra $1K/yr for a total loss of $2K/yr, because they got guns and we don't and the only moral doctrine we operate under is "might makes right" (there seems to be no moral, ethical, or technological argument behind it other than "you have money; we have guns; so we can take your money; say bye to your money"). At that point the residents of the city are $2K/yr poorer, and because we have a failed state of a government, any money it gets will lower the standard of living rather then increase it, so they buy the cops more guns to shoot kids in the back with, or invade yet another helpless country, or whatever other stuff you see in todays headlines just more of it.
So if its not implemented, the city residents on average are $1K/yr poorer, and if we do implement it, the city residents on average are more than $2K/yr worse off. So I'm not exactly looking forward to this.
Is there any other realistic, fact based, historically likely outcomes of the proposal other than making the poor bastards who are currently suffering, suffer even more?
Another aspect that burns me, is the institutionalization and codification and respect of stupidity. You don't want to get flooded by the river, try not living on the river bank. Tired of having to work harder to bail out idiots. Don't care if the river floods once a decade due to mother nature or twice a decade due to man made global warming, what I'm tired of is handing out money to morons repeatedly. You wanna drown? Go ahead, build there, that's a great place to drown. Just stop asking me for money over and over and over and I'm fine with that. You wanna stop being $1K/yr poorer, stop living on a river bank that floods all the time instead of proposing some ridiculous sin-tax scheme that won't do anything anyway because the idiots will still be living on the river bank that floods, they'll just be a little poorer.