[mattpallissard]

I'm tired of viewing taxes as a punishment. Taxes are for funding the government. If you're going to tax someone make sure the money goes to something specific, like keeping tire junk out of waterways.

Some people like to drive, some people like big cars. Fix the tires, grand-daddy in all the existing cars, incentivize cleaner ones, and let everything age out.

They're doing it with heat pumps, why not cars?

[txru]

A core economic concept is externalities, positive and negative. Positive externalities are undervalued by the market, negative ones are overvalued by the market, like cigarettes.

There aren't many ways to resolve externalities. If you pay people to quit cigarettes, people start smoking to get paid for quitting.

For negative externalities, sometimes you just really have to make the good more expensive, or we'll end up bearing the much larger societal costs down the road, like we did for lead in gasoline and widespread cigarette smoking.

[asdasdsddd]

It's not about punishment, its about pricing in externalities

[earthling8118]

On the level of the US federal government, taxes are absolutely not for funding. They could hardly be more removed from it.

They're a restriction the money supply, but they don't determine what funding is.

[faeriechangling]

All taxes are behaviour disincentives. If we tax say income but not pollution, we're discouraging people from working while the price of pollution is not paid by the polluter. If we're subsidising clean cars at the same time, w'ere also having wage earners subsidise cars for the upper-middle class.

This is great if you enjoy polluting and not working, such as if you're a trust fund kid who likes to drive his big car everywhere while the poor and workers suffer the consequences, but is not a societally conducive state of affairs.

With cars, every incentive you can devise has reverse Robin Hood effects since the poor use transit and bicycles, and both incentives and disincentives are being used in practice anyways. It's in fact perfectly fair for people inflicting an unpriced externality on the broader population, through pollution, to pay a fraction of the cost of that externality themselves. If that disincentivizes the behaviour - is that so morally outrageous?

Is it truly fairer to instead bribe this wealthier than average group of polluters into not polluting through taxes on the rest of the population? If anything this creates a moral hazard insofar that it would seem the key to getting the government to subsidise your expenses is simply to pollute relentlessly and inflict costs on the rest of society and say "You can't just TAX us, you need to tax everybody else and pay us off!"