[simonh]

The problem is price spikes have a much lower impact on people who are reasonably well off, which is a lot of people with high consumption. They may reduce their energy usage a bit, but a lot of them will just take this hit financially because they can afford it. Frankly I'm in that category, a doubling of energy prices might reduce my savings for the year but by itself would be unlikely to affect my energy usage much. Meanwhile people on low incomes get absolutely hammered, and they probably have low usage anyway so there's not much they can even do about it.

In a situation like this price signalling isn't enough. We need to treat it as the emergency it is, and my family and I have got to do some thinking about our usage and how to reduce it, but that needs to happen across the European economies.

[loeg]

> The problem is price spikes have a much lower impact on people who are reasonably well off, which is a lot of people with high consumption. ... Meanwhile people on low incomes get absolutely hammered, and they probably have low usage anyway so there's not much they can even do about it.

That sounds like an argument for a progressive pricing structure with an even more extreme increase at the highest consumption tiers? E.g., would 10x increase in marginal cost affect your consumption? It would probably affect mine.

[sprucevoid]

Robert Frank's progressive consumption tax proposal, https://archive.ph/AXDkQ

Another alternative is flat consumption taxes on climate damaging products combined with general wealth taxation and cash redistribution to lower the impact on low income/wealth households.

[hedora]

I'm a fan of flat income tax with flat, per-person guaranteed income. Set the tax rate and base income so that the changeover is revenue neutral, zero income people are a bit better off than currently, and the 90th percentile pays about what they pay now. Billionaires will end up paying way more. (In this proposal, capital gains are treated as regular income.)

The beauty of this is that now you can add astronomical consumption taxes, and just plow the increased revenue into the guaranteed income pool. On average, the consumption tax is revenue neutral for the government, and (as a percentage of income) disproportionately goes to the poor.

Also, you can eliminate 99% of the US tax accounting industry, food stamp program administration, and all sorts of other bureaucracies.

[sprucevoid]

Yes to per-person guaranteed income. No to flat income (or wealth) tax (progressivity is better so no good reason to switch to something worse). Revenue neutrality: only if, and to the extent, it makes it makes the policy package easier to pass.

[hedora]

In practice, progressive tax curves and incentive programs let politicians meddle. Once they can meddle, lobbyists write the tax code.

So-called progressive taxes are always regressive in practice, at least in the US. Keeping the math simple makes it easy to keep them honest. (Make the marginal rate 40-50% if you want. Just set the base income so that the middle class is paying 33%.)

[sprucevoid]

> In practice, progressive tax curves and incentive programs let politicians meddle.

Is there cross-country comparative empirical evidence for that? My hunch is that very obscure tax curves (trapezoids and what not with layers of ad hoc edge cases) are vulnerable to meddling. But I doubt there's a general meddle-ability difference between simple forms of progressivity vs flat.

[hackerfromthefu]

I do wonder if this has an effect of encouraging the segments of society that don't plan so well, ultimately undermining the goal of saving resources, in the longer term.

In my own country we see significant proportions of multi-generational welfare demographics that are incentivized to breed and often with multiple children, because someone else picks up the tab. However the working class who that try to get ahead under their own steam before maybe breeding are having children later, and less of them if at all.

[sprucevoid]

> I do wonder if this has an effect of encouraging the segments of society that don't plan so well

From the POV of climate destruction the segments that don't plan so well, or to put it more bluntly, who plan and act so badly that they're strongly disproportionately responsible for the problem are those that the progressive consumption tax (and general wealth taxation) adresses: the wealthiest.

US style welfare provisions have three flaws at the same time. It is (1) not generous enough to escape the costly everyday scarcity tax* (2) spiked with time-wasting conditions and bureaucratic procedures and (3) politically and socially stigmatized. The US should transition to the northern european welfare state model which works better in all those three regards.

* https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/scientificam...

[pjc50]

> multi-generational welfare demographics that are incentivized to breed

This is almost always a racial slur that turns out not to be true on closer inspection.

[Workaccount2]

White people are the largest demographic of poverty in the US.

So racist against white people I guess?

[hedora]

More like cognitive dissonance.

The states most strongly against a welfare state invariably receive the most welfare.

See also: Attempts to repeal Obamacare without infuriating the parts of the Republican base that are most loudly calling for a repeal.