John Larson is fighting a lonely, apparently hopeless fight to do something that is extremely sensible:
Representative John B. Larson embarked again this week on his lonely quest to enact a national tax on carbon dioxide emissions.
His idea is to set a modest price on a ton of emissions, gradually increasing it each year until the desired reduction in heat-trapping-gas pollution is achieved. Under the bill he introduced this week, virtually all the revenues from the tax would be returned to the public in lower payroll taxes.
“The American people want us to level with them,” Mr. Larson, a moderate Democrat from Connecticut and a member of the House leadership, said in an interview. “We create price certainty without any new bureaucracies or complicated auction schemes.”
Many economists and academics, as well as a handful of Mr. Larson’s colleagues on both sides of the aisle and perhaps a few White House officials, if secretly, agree that a carbon tax is a simpler and more effective means of tackling global warming than the complex cap-and-trade scheme embraced by the Obama administration and most Democratic leaders in Congress.
Even Al Gore has accepted the political reality that only a more cumbersome and less effective “cap and trade” system has any possibility of becoming law, though he would prefer a plan like Larson’s. The article points out that the cap and trade systems adopted in Europe have not performed well.
It’s true, as I’ve noted before, that the perfect is the enemy of the good. But there are also times when the “possible” is the enemy of the necessary. That seems to be the case with the carbon tax/cap and trade issue, as it is with the single payer/complex-make-sure-you-subsidize private insurance health care issue and the nationalize/throw money at banks issue.
Perhaps this is simply the playing out of an historical dynamic. Maybe all political systems ultimately fall apart because of the accumulated weight of choosing the possible over the necessary. What’s troubling is that so often we assume what is necessary is not possible. Cap and trade advocates point out that carbon tax proposals have been unpopular elsewhere. The fact is that both the straight on tax or “cap and trade” will be violently opposed in this country. Larson’s idea is to use the carbon tax to reduce the payroll tax, meaning it would benefit the vast majority of workers in this country from a financial perspective, not to mention that it would be more effective in preserving the planet on which they reside. It should be possible to sell that kind of tax, if one marketed it right, particularly if one were not overly concerned with being charged with waging “class warfare”. Parenthetically, isn’t it funny that the people most opposed to class warfare are the most likely to support any other form of warfare.
Larson may lose this fight, but he should be congratulated for waging it.
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