Piece One, Step One

Tax restructuring.

We need to tax environmentally harming activities and products, and correspondingly, WE NEED TO REDUCE AND EVENTUALLY ELIMINATE TAXES ON INCOME, ESPECIALLY WAGE INCOME (thought that might get your attention). This would be a revenue neutral proposition in all likelihood.

We then need to tax health harming activities and products, and even societal harming activities and products. We need to do this for, among other reasons, to pay down our gargantuan debt that is choking us to death.

In short, we need to tax the things that are harmful and quit taxing the things that are beneficial. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan: If you want to have less of something, tax it; if you want to have more of something, un-tax it.

Right now, the market does not reflect the ecological or social costs of many things, hence skewing our decisions because we are either making them without correct information, or getting an apparently free ride. But those costs are borne by us regardless, just in an irrational and absurdly twisted and abusively wasteful manner.

So, step one of piece one is to gradually, but quickly, raise taxes to their true cost level on environmentally damaging things like oil, coal, etc. while correspondingly reducing income taxes. Making this a carbon tax is the easiest to understand and the easiest for the market to adjust to, unlike complex cap and trade systems which are wonky at best and subject to much more perversion. Making it a carbon tax also means that the most damaging things that produce more carbon, like coal, get taxed more, while less damaging things, like natural gas, get taxed less. You also then don’t have to get into expensive (and, once again, more easily perverted) systems of tax credits and the like. The market will do all that for you as it flows to what are the least costly alternatives once the true costs have been factored.