Carleas wrote:Three proposals with strong empirical and theoretical backing are:
- A carbon tax to reduce emissions
- Using Health Savings Accounts (HSA) to pay for healthcare
- A Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a social safety net
Though these are pretty well supported as solutions to the problems they address, they are all fairly politically unpopular. New taxes are unpopular, making it easy for interested parties to resist a carbon tax. HSAs are good for those who can afford to pay into them, but don't work for people who just don't have money to put away. And a UBI evokes all the distrust of individuals for the spending decisions of everyone else.
However, if these three policies are combined, the result may be significantly more politically palatable. Here's how it could work: implement a carbon tax, starting low and slowly increasing over time to phase out carbon-intensive energy production. To reduce the 'new tax' stigma, make it revenue neutral: all money is paid out to individuals as a UBI. But to avoid the political landmine that that entails, instead of paying out in cash, put the payouts into privately held HSAs that can be used for health spending until the money has been held for a certain period of time, or the balance is above a certain minimum. After the specified period or beyond the minimum balance, the excess can be withdrawn as cash.
So you want to have a new carbon tax, which would translate to higher prices on many goods and services in the broad economy; then take the money collected through the tax and give it out to poor and low middle class people in the form of money for an HSA?
I'll admit, it's a pretty creative approach.
However, I reject the basic concepts, so I would also reject combining them together (even if I appreciate your ingenuity here... we need more thinking outside the box). HSAs are the only of your ideas here that I can support.
Carbon taxes are a terrible idea. The solution to global warming and greenhouse gas contributions is not going to come from either strangulating our own economy or deindustrializing (what we need is more research, more technology, more carbon capture and carbon recycling; we need to also re-evaulate the science involved since CO2 can be considered an asset and a resource in the right situations). Higher prices for you and me is only going to cause economic harm on both the consumer and producer end, and lead to only modest decreases of emissions anyway. Not only this, but production and manufacturing will keep shifting to the third world where such taxes do not apply, thereby allowing some companies to keep a supply chain at lower cost to help out-compete American or other western companies that are subject to carbon taxes.
So in essence you get what is already happening with onerous environmental regulations in the west: production and manufacturing shifts to China and similar places, where such regulations do not exist, therefore there is not really a net decrease of pollution at all, and in all likelihood there is a net increase because American production even prior to extremely onerous regulations was still more environmentally clean than typical third world production. So you just shift the burdens around the globe in order to keep prices from rising too much here, but still hurting the western economics, and without making a real impact on emission reductions.
As I said in another thread here, why do you think North Korea and others like it are signing onto the Paris Agreement? Do you really think it is out of benevolent concern for the environment? Fuck no, they see fat dollar signs and increasing statist legitimacy of their already oppressive powers over every aspect of their citizen's lives.
To the issue of universal basic income, this is one issue that I really can't stand. Has anyone done the math to figure out how much this would cost? I have. Let me show you:
Number of extreme poor in America: 43.1 million (
https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-cu ... ted-states)
Actually let's use this one: Percentage of Americans at either the lowest income tax bracket (10%) or pay no income taxes: around 50% (
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/w ... -americans)
US population: 326,291,926 (
http://www.worldometers.info/world-popu ... opulation/)
Let's assume that we provide a UBI to only people who are either in extreme poverty or at the lowest income tax bracket of 10% (for annual income of $9,375 or less). This amounts to giving UBI to about 50% of 326,291,926, or 163,145,963.
Now, how much should a UBI pay out? An article I found uses $200 a month as an estimate, although of course that is hardly enough to be considered income (if you earn $50 a week you are not even paying for food, unless you only eat rice and ramen -- $50 a week is $7.14 a day, which is $3.57 a meal for two meals a day... yeah, good luck with that). But sure, let's go with $200, even though I think it is reasonable to assume a number at least twice this big.
$200 a month x12 months x163,145,963 = $391,550,311,200 a year
So the idea is, we spend a new $400 billion dollars a year, which is about 34% of the total federal annual budget, to pay over 150 million people $200 a month so they can afford to go to McDonalds a few times a week rather than just eat rice and ramen?
This is the entire point: we cannot afford UBI. The whole idea is pure shit. Not only at the practical economic level but also at the philosophical level -- so we are just going to pay people for existing, for just sitting around breathing? What the fuck? Totally divorcing income from work or effort is madness, that sounds like a swift collapse into total economic ruin. But don't get me wrong, I want to alleviate poverty and have reasonable welfare safety nets... but not like UBI. UBI is maybe the worst idea I have ever encountered in politics, and it is amazing that the idea is gaining such traction. I suppose there is no real upper limit to the seductive power of virtue signaling.
Not only this, but how are we going to pay for that? More debt? We have 20 trillion dollars of debt already, basically everyone is broke and economic disparities and income inequality are increasing sharply, with the middle class getting shrunk; we have unfunded public liabilities in the quadrillions, and you think we can afford to spend an additional 34% of what is already a basically debt-funded federal budget on giving people a few more bucks in their pocket? I cannot imagine a more insane and useless way to spend money, even if we weren't already being crushed by debt, which we are.
As for HSAs, yes these are good ideas. I've already outlined my idea to replace health insurance with what are basically HSAs only, maybe I will dig it up and post it here. Insurance for health care is a complete scam.