[concinds]

Blaming "profiteering and ever-increasing growth" is way too easy.

Can any legislature get away with dramatically increasing taxes on meat, fish, gas, and plane tickets, just at a level high enough to account for environmental externalities? Even dictatorships couldn't get away with it because it would cause too much unrest.

[alluro2]

Why do you think that is? Hint: taxing people buying food, which is getting worse and worse, while the top 0.01% gets more and more rich and keeps making it worse, is maybe not the solution people should embrace that you think it is...

[tracker1]

An easier path would be to stop subsidizing the core of what is making junk foods to begin with. For that matter, at least in the US, having individual states require limitations of importing pre-processed goods could help too.

I've thought that it might be an idea for more states to require at least half of all beef and chicken to be imported into the state in at least half-carcass form. This would incentivize local farming, and local processing, reducing the more centralized processing and the environmental impacts could be further reduced in a lot of ways. That's just for meat.

Forcing insurance company accounting to average to single-payer modals and limit coverage combinations to no more than 3 choices across the nation could help with another part. Refactoring all federally funded insurance (medicare/medicaid/va/federal-employees) into a non-profit insurance corp that does likewise and any private company can also buy policies from would help to. Finally, establish "part time" work as no more than 10 hours a week averaged per 4 week window. Then require all employers to provide medical insurance for all workers that meets what the npo insurance provides.

The recent changes to USDA food guidelines are a step in the right direction, mostly... but there's still room to improve. Education in and of itself should improve dramatically. For that matter, actually having schools "make" most of their food instead of relying on premade/packaged goods would be a massive step in a right direction. Have every student participate in meal preparation at least a few hours a week as part of school work would help a lot.

I'd like to see some incentivization for more companies returning to a dividends model that includes employee profit sharing as part of said formula. I think this would do a LOT to shore up the middle class again.

Sorry, just went off on a total tangent... hitting reply anyway, but don't take anything too serious/deep... these thoughts are kind of always lingering in the back of my mind... I've just never been in a position to actually act on any of them politically.

[alluro2]

Thanks for a thoughtful and longer-form reply. All of these ideas absolutely make sense - and their challenges and compromises could be worked on, of course.

But, even starting to think about each of them, I can't escape the frame of the current socio-economic structure, where short-term profits currently trump all, and influence of the aforementioned "0.01%" (or whatever we call it) is direct, heavy and effective, and all of that brought us here to a large extent in the first place.

In such a reality of ours, these kinds of initiatives don't go far - and even if surfaced in the media, there is a significant portion of population who would be very strongly against them, due to how opinions have been shaped and polarised over past decades.

It does seem almost impossible from current perspective.

[concinds]

Cool, you can fix the wealth inequality. But you also need to fix the excessive consumption of beef, fuel, and every other CO2-emitting good, whether consumed by you or by the "top 0.001%". You can't use "wealth inequality" as an excuse to delay action on climate change. Those goods' consumption needs to go down.

Fuel is trickier and requires investments and a transition period, but a beef tax would be trivial, and there are infinite substitute goods available.

[ghurtado]

Why do you present your second paragraph as if it were a reasonable solution to anything?

It's a kindergartners view on troubleshooting an unfathomably complex issue.

"Well just raise taxes and fix that!"

[tracker1]

"Carbon Credits"??

[throwaway27448]

Humans won't know if they don't try.

Here in the us, we could squeeze the rich and feed the whole world for many years. But we simply don't indicate basic survival instincts.

[keybored]

They’re blaming entities with power. E.g. 90% of the US have no impact on policy evidenced by there being no correlation between their policy preferences and real policy (2011 Princeton study).

> Can any legislature get away with dramatically increasing taxes on meat, fish, gas, and plane tickets, just at a level high enough to account for environmental externalities? Even dictatorships couldn't get away with it because it would cause too much unrest.

Is the idea to increase the VAT or something? The taxes on consumption?

Okay, so how would this work? You increase these taxes so that the bad consumers don’t travel for pleasure (just companies for business). Eventually people just buy what they need, like food which is presumably decently locally sourced, enough clothes to not freeze or be indecent. You’re still left with gas for commuting to job because people live an hour from work not out of choice but because of real estate prices. And what are in the stores are Made in China or Vietnam because that’s how the global market works; cheap shipping from cheap countries.

But these taxes would organically change all of that?

The usual narrative conveniently focuses on how Joe Beergut is causing problems by driving to work. And that this is how taxation should work; individual income, individual consumption, individual taxes. The more and more “libertarian”, the more the narrative slide towards taxes on income, taxes on consumption, and eventually just a flat tax because that is “fair”. But that seems to leave the big blindspot of corporations and individuals that might own fleets of trucks that of course tax the road infrastructure—no taxes for them?

But what headway could be made if the externalities were all caused by Joe Beergut. Libertarians and the environmental narrative might agree.