To be fair, many of these sorts of taxes can be regressive, so even if you’re fine with paternalism, you might legitimately have qualms about them. In theory of course, you can alter the overall system of taxes and benefits to redress this, but in practice it seems unlikely to work that way.
Obviously we should discuss the impact of each pigou tax I mentioned: alcohol, cigarettes, congestion pricing, and fossil fuels, needs to be discussed separately and in detail. The distribution of the tax burden would be affected far more by taxing fossil fuels than any of the other categories, but cap-and-trade has similar effects on people’s pocketbooks. As far as I can tell these are the only two reasoned approaches to global warming.
In many cases the poor experience the negative externality most heavily, so its unclear that taxes which appear regressive, actually are.
To be fair, many of these sorts of taxes can be regressive, so even if you’re fine with paternalism, you might legitimately have qualms about them. In theory of course, you can alter the overall system of taxes and benefits to redress this, but in practice it seems unlikely to work that way.
Obviously we should discuss the impact of each pigou tax I mentioned: alcohol, cigarettes, congestion pricing, and fossil fuels, needs to be discussed separately and in detail. The distribution of the tax burden would be affected far more by taxing fossil fuels than any of the other categories, but cap-and-trade has similar effects on people’s pocketbooks. As far as I can tell these are the only two reasoned approaches to global warming.
In many cases the poor experience the negative externality most heavily, so its unclear that taxes which appear regressive, actually are.