War is for Winning

Climate Change Summarised

Climate change is a global crisis caused by over consumption of Earth's resources. This crisis demands a rapid and effective response. Cap and Trade is a negative unworkable response, it is a big government initiative. Small government offers the only effective positive response to the climate change crisis.

Western capitalist societies dominate the worlds economy and are consumer driven, not production driven. Positive solutions harness the consumer economy to combat climate change, negative solutions attempt to control production.

We are consumer driven democracies, we must empower consumer growth in enviromentally sustainable pathways - we must give consumers more access to wealth and tax pollution literally off the planet. We should not engage in production controls, there should be no limits set.

The pollution taxation should be as high as we can possibly make it, as high as our local economy can stand. This taxation rate should be higher than the anemic costs suggested under a global Cap'n'Trade, but differ in positive ways. Taxation should be in the form of a Value Added Tax (VAT) for a sales cummulative of all pollution ultimately charged to the domestic consumer. Equivalent pollution tax to be charged on local and imported goods, but not charged on exports. Thus our productive economy is unharmed and able to adapt quickly to changed demand, whilst our consumers are directly aware of any saving to be made by reducing the amount of pollution their purchases create.

This taxation regime couples consumer driven change to saving the planet, therefore to be most effective requires maximising the amount of consumer involvement. We must reduce the size of the state, because the state is not a consumer driven entity. A states funding mechanisms (taxation and borrowing) are immune to the effect of consumer taxation, because they are the recipient of that taxation. This means a paradigm shift is required not only for our present taxation policy, but also our state spending - it must be reduced. We need to motivate as much of the economy as quickly as possible to reduce pollution, by doing what co. Getting rid of all non-essential state enterprises and moving state employees to the private sector will be amongst our highest priorities should we wish to save the planet.

Welfare is socially required. Welfare programs (pensions, unemployment relief, healthcare) should be increased to cope with the additional demand pollution taxation places on the poor, but these programs must be stringently asset tested and privately administered.

Labels: NLG

posted by unaha-closp @ 3:40 PM