Let’s start with the good news.
The good news about the Greens’ Carbon Tax Plan is what it takes away. We would see the end of Nick Smith’s Appalling Emissions Trading Scam, income taxes removed on the first $200 of income, and (maybe) 1% removed from company tax.
Fair play to the Greens for that.
Now for the bad news.
The bad news is that these small, one-off tax cuts (around $319 per annum per household, claims Norman, about 90 cents a day) are to make up for their new, permanent and much larger Carbon Tax, which would raise the price of everything – fuel, food, power, housing, transport, anything that needs transporting … and probably by far more than the sub-one-dollar-a-day your household would be getting in his tax cut.
Nick Smith’s Emissions Trading Scam currently has the ‘price’ of carbon at around $5 per tonne, and this price rises and falls with the level of disinterest in the carbon scam. Mostly, it falls. Russel Norman wants to set his new Tax at $25 per tonne, and he wants it to never, ever fall again. As if it were possible to tax ourselves into a more prosperous future.
Additionally, they want to add a new bureaucracy, a “Climate Commission” whose task would be to constantly harp on about global warming – and good luck ever getting rid of a canker like that once begun – and a “suite of complementary measures” to support the “rapid transition to a carbon neutral economy.”
Don’t bother to examine what their three-piece suite will look like. Just understand it means even more costs paid by taxpayers.
True, Russel will temporarily allow dairy and forestry to only pay half his full rate. Temporarily. But that’s just the sort of thing you do say before an election, isn’t it. And even their temporary half-rate is a little higher than what other farmers are forced to pay around the world.
How much do farmers pay around the world? Answer: nothing.
Mind you, Russel says even the lowest-performing dairy farmers would still be profitable under its carbon tax plan,” which, if not true, would be a lie – and it it were true, begs the question of what they are trying to achieve .
Because the point of their carbon tax being imposed on various producers is to reduce their production.
So this is simply the sort of thing you say this side of an election.
If he really did want to use tax cuts to promote his agenda, there is a better way.
And if he really does want a carbon tax, here’s a more honest one.
3 comments:
Someone should ask Mr. Norman exactly what he would do to fix the perceived problem (entirely leaving out whether it is reality or not) of AGW if he was given his druthers. I'd love ANYONE to answer this question. Nobody has. They're too busy claiming the sky is falling (or the sea rising) to realise that even if everyone agreed that this was so, nobody has any viable solution, coercive or otherwise, to the putative problem.
Given that fact, I fail to see how any collectivist action could ever solve this problem, even if all agreed it existed. You can't legislate outside your own country, and given that fact, there is zero point in legislating within it.
Note that I'm deliberately leaving morality out of this. Any fans of coercion care to comment on the practicality of "fixing" AGW? If you agree with me that the answer is "you simply can't", what do you expect to happen?
@Greig: Given that only "action" proposed is government action to ban private action, I doubt that any active solutions are contemplated. Beyond the bans and collective action themselves, of course, which to a certain mentality are their own rewards.
@Peter Exactly. Which is why I'm asking as honestly as I can "just what exactly do you (being those in favour of action - govt or some magical other) want done, and how do you see it actually working?"
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