Sacrifice

I've been trying to think up a good lead in to a post about taxes and sacrifice and politicians'--and by extension Americans'--unwillingness to confront long-term problems if such confrontation involves actually doing anything, and fortunately commenter alkali came through for me:

If you were going to try to discourage use of mercury in consumer products by imposing a mercury tax, you really wouldn't have to suggest that it be revenue neutral: even if you sent the after-tax price of mercury through the roof, you wouldn't bring in all that much revenue. Carbon is different because we use so much fossil fuel. If you are going to tax it enough to make a difference, you have to cut somewhere else, or you're going to end up raising taxes by 30-50%.

I have my doubts about how true this is.

It was once the case that the American government could tax American citizens whenever taxing American citizens was deemed necessary and sometimes even when it just seemed like a neat idea. That's not the case anymore. What we have now is one political party that's made the word "tax" radioactive, another political party that's bought into that rendering, and a parade of lobbies willing to lavish money on whichever political party most aggressively arguing against taxing their industries. Assume for a second that there was a powerful heavy-metals lobby (I think there is, actually, but not knowing anything about it, I'd rather just play pretend): The only way to drive the cost of Mercury through the roof would be to portray it as an immediate and high-impact threat to the lives of children and other Americans. And even then a tax would meet with some resistance, or would be accompanied by a significant welfare program for the companies hurt by such a tax.

If Hillary Clinton woke up tomorrow and made taxing carbon the centerpiece of her campaign, nobody would even need to make any calls. High-profile Republicans, and even some high-profile Democrats would just understand that it was their job to go on television and lambaste the proposal as one that would prevent Americans everywhere from driving to work, cost coal and oil company employees their jobs, increase the size of government, and do all the other bad things that taxes are always accused of doing. And that would be the end of that proposal

America's reliance on fossil fuels of course complicates the politics of a carbon tax, adding yet another layer of unfeasibility to it. But that at least makes some sense. The fact that the much larger obstacle to a carbon tax is that it's called a "carbon tax" is rooted in a non-reality manufactured by a fairly recent species of conservatism. And it's also totally demented.

The way things are in America now, a carbon tax will only be feasible when coastal cities are beginning to flood, when more than one southern state is being ravaged by drought, and when devastating Gulf Coast hurricanes are a monthly phenomenon from May through November every year.

And therein, I think, lies the reason the cartoon version of taxation has taken such a strong hold in this country. That as a nation governed to an outsize extent by the business class we have fostered an extremely nearsighted culture--where thinking in terms of fiscal quarters and annual budgets and near-term optimization is just accepted as the proper way to structure the economy.

In that a "tax" might shrink an individual's or a company's or the country's projected bottom line come 2009, it is out of the question. And in that the worst consequences of climate change lie 50 or 100 years in the future, it's not a threat and not worth addressing anytime soon.