Jonathan Hiskes reports for Grist that Gordon Campbell and the British Columbia Liberal Party have gotten themselves re-elected in a campaign in which BC’s carbon tax was a major issue. An important piece of context to have here is that despite the name “Liberal” and their support for a carbon tax, the BC Liberal Party is the major right-of-center party in British Columbia provincial politics. The opposition New Democratic Party is the local left-wing.
It’s easy enough to understand why members of congress don’t want to go within a 100 miles of the words “carbon tax,” but I’m a bit surprised that you don’t see more interest in carbon taxes in jurisdictions that are already heavily dependent on consumption taxes for revenue. Nobody likes to say “tax” and regressive taxes—which a carbon tax would be—are in some ways especially dicey. But insofar as you’re already relying on a regressive value-added tax (VAT) to raise revenue, as most advanced democracies around the world are, it seems to me that swapping VAT revenue for carbon tax revenue should have green appeal without political toxicity. In principle, you could imagine the same thing at the state level for states that have high sales tax rates.
Unfortunately, as applied at the level of a small jurisdiction, a “green tax shift” is likely to do a lot of pushing polluting activity into other jurisdictions rather than actually eliminating the polluting activity. Still, it seems like good policy to me. You could actually imagine this, as in British Columbia, being something a right-of-center politician finds appealing.
Previous in TP Yglesias
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.