[LaEc]

I agree with most of your ideas except energy ownership. However, as a Singaporean I have to say that Singapore has HSAs. They are called MediSave accounts and are separate from CPF although both earn interest. CPF is the retirement plan.

[basch]

My understanding was CPF was the overarching program, Medisave was the HSA, and CPF MS was the IRA. Medisave is part of the overall CPF program.

What part of energy ownership don't you disagree with? I still wasn't advocating against private industry doing the extraction or creation. Just that if you pull something from underground, it gets taxed and benefits everybody, not just the person who bought it from the person who stole it 175 years ago.

[LaEc]

I think we are talking at cross-purposes, but I read your comment as suggesting a single account. No one calls our IRA the CPF MS, CPF always refers to the IRA and Medisave is totally separate even if it is partly administered by the CPF board.

What is the purpose of that tax? In public finance, we don't want to unnecessarily distort incentives by picking winners and losers. Taxing natural resource extraction for no good reason chases away companies in those industries and forces them to pursue other businesses, possibly leaving only the most profitable monopolies to survive. If we want to raise revenue, why not just raise VAT, corporate tax, income tax, or property tax more generally.

[basch]

It's not taxing the company doing the extraction, its taxing the company that owns the mineral rights (the land.) Those may likely be the same thing, but the extraction and refinement itself is still profitable.

It would be akin to the government pulling eminent domain, and saying "the oil under the country belongs to the people, not who owns the deed."

This is basically what Alaska did. They said "if you plunder our natural resources, the profit gets shared with the people whos natural resources you are plundering."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund