Economy
Trudeau shatters myth of ‘ideal’ carbon tax
From the Fraser Institute
For several decades now, some economists have supported the idea of carbon taxes. An ideal carbon tax, they argue, is uniform across the economy, fuel/technology neutral, in lieu of—not atop of—additional regulations and subsidies, and revenue neutral.
Others, including myself, have argued that such an ideal carbon tax can never be implemented or maintained because of something called “public choice theory,” which holds that policymakers are not neutral, objective, dispassionate problem-solvers but rather self-interested agents who will enact policies primarily to advance their political interests, which guarantees corruption of “ideal” policies. If one understands public choice theory, one must understand that the ideal carbon tax is a myth, which would not survive its first contact with real-world political actors.
For example, in a 2017 study, I showed that none of Canada’s provincial carbon taxes were implemented in anything close to the ideal form (with the exception of British Columbia’s carbon tax, for its first few years). Still, many economists embraced the federal carbon tax, sure in the possibility of realizing the ideal form.
But last month, Prime Minister Trudeau elegantly ended the debate about the potential for ideal carbon taxes to survive in the political wilds and announced his government would postpone an expansion of his signature carbon tax. As you’ve probably heard, the government will suspend the tax on heating fuel used primarily in Atlantic Canada and provide additional subsidies to Atlantic Canadians by doubling the rural carbon tax rebate to help them switch from heating with oil to electric heat pumps.
This is a three-way violation of the “ideal carbon tax” concept beloved by some economists. Trudeau has made the federal carbon tax non-uniform, ended technological neutrality and—by exempting a swath of emissions—made it less efficient and effective. Again, in a political world, political self-interest will always lead to the corruption of ideal regulatory or tax regimens. Even the University of Calgary’s Trevor Tombe, a diehard fan of the carbon tax, now suggests it might be the beginning of the end for the entire idea of carbon taxes. The carbon tax is dead, he writes. Or at least, its days may be numbered.
Of course, Atlantic Canadians get a sweet deal—a three-year tax moratorium and more money in their pockets for heating equipment changes. On the other hand, the Prairie provinces once again receive the back of the prime minister’s hand, cementing (not that it needs much cementing) the perception that he dislikes the Prairies and seeks to punish them for having the temerity to resist his efforts to loot them of natural resource revenues and provincial sovereignty. Not only will Prairie folk not get a break on carbon taxes on their heating fuel (primarily natural gas) but they also won’t get increased rebate cheques to help them transition to lower-emission forms of heating and cooling.
Prime Minister Trudeau’s move to pervert the federal carbon tax even farther from the economically ideal model proves yet again that such ideal forms are always inherently doomed to corruption by the political process. The harmful impacts of a carbon tax, unmitigated by those various “ideal” caveats, is landing on the pocketbooks of the public, and one suspects the prime minister knows it. He should consider stealing an issue from his leading political rival and take an axe to the tax he created, rather than leave that chore to his successor.
Author:
From the Brownstone Institute
By
After the lockdowns of 2020 and the vaccine mandates of 2021, most Americans have heard about the idea of medical freedom and many have concerns about informed consent. One in four of our countrymen say they know someone who was seriously injured or killed by the Covid vaccines. The need for informed consent in medicine is apparent. But far fewer know anything about food freedom, or why it matters.
Medical freedom and food freedom are two sides of the same coin, and unless we fight to protect both, we will have neither.
Looking to the future in his 1951 book The Impact of Science on Society, the Nobel Prize-winning British mathematician, philosopher, and eugenicist Bertrand Russell forecast a future where the elites would use science as a means to control the population: “Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.”
In The Scientific Outlook, Russell also wrote: “[In the future], [children’s] diet(s) will not be left to the caprices of parents, but will be such as the best biochemists recommend.”
While this likely sounded far-fetched to most of Russell’s contemporaries, his words capture our current era with alarming accuracy. In the past three years, millions of Americans saw their lives and livelihoods destroyed through injections and injunctions. Small businesses were decimated by the lockdowns. Legions of hard-working people faced ruin for demanding their right of informed consent – to evaluate the facts regarding any so-called medical treatment and to decide for themselves if they wanted it. They were fired for refusing the vaccine. They were killed with remdesivir. They died when doctors and bureaucrats denied them the truly safe and effective treatments they demanded, such as ivermectin.
Some of you are among the brave few who stood up in that moment and did what was right, to protect patients and vulnerable people at great cost to yourselves. I applaud you for this. You know first-hand what it means to have the boot of Injections and Injunctions on your face.
Now the third piece of the control grid Russell laid out must come into focus: diet. The battle to control you through what you eat is very real. It threatens to destroy what sovereignty we have left, and it is being perpetrated by the very same people who brought you “safe and effective injections” and “two weeks to slow the spread.”
The Covid lockdowns revealed the weakness of our overly centralized supply food chain on a global level. Government-mandated shutdowns disrupted food distribution hubs and shuttered meat processing plants, causing chaos, riots, and unrest worldwide as people scrambled to find food for their families. The situation deteriorated further when Russia invaded Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe; numerous countries in Asia and Africa depended on Ukrainian grain for their sustenance. The decreased harvest drove up grain prices around the world, contributing to terrible food shortages for millions.
In 2023, 282 million people globally experienced high levels of acute hunger – an increase of 8.5 percent from 2022’s already elevated levels. In the United States, one in eight American households lacked adequate food in 2022, according to a report from the US Department of Agriculture.
You’d think this would be the time to support farmers around the world who are trying to feed the hungry masses, and to encourage local food systems that are resilient in the face of supply-chain disruption. Instead, in country after country, World Economic Forum-affiliated leaders are cracking down on independent farmers and forcing them to comply with draconian new rules in the name of combating climate change.
In Sri Lanka, the World Economic Forum-affiliated Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe banned all chemical fertilizers in a bid to combat climate change, forcing farms to go organic overnight, something which any organic farmer will tell you is a recipe for disaster – making a change like this, even on a single farm, takes planning and time. Combined with an acute diesel shortage, this edict left farms unable to operate, leading to soaring food prices and famine. The situation became so dire that in 2022, hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans rioted, invaded the presidential palace, and overthrew their government.
In Ireland, the agricultural sector has been ordered to cut carbon emissions by 25% in the next seven years. This requirement will drive many farms into bankruptcy and will force the culling of hundreds of thousands of cows.
In Canada, the goal is fertilizer reduction of 30%, including reductions in manure use on organic farms – the only viable alternative to chemical fertilizer. Farmers are ringing the alarm bells that this policy will devastate the food supply. Even though milk prices are hitting record levels, Canadian officials still force farmers to dump their milk if they produce more than an arbitrary quota. Dairy owners are banned from giving the milk away to neighbors or homeless shelters. In Ontario, farmers cannot sell their milk directly to consumers at all, but must sell it to a single government-approved body which then decides how it is distributed.
In the Netherlands, the government is requiring a 30% reduction in livestock and mandating cuts in nitrogen of up to 95% – nitrogen that is released from cow manure and, if used properly, is an earth-friendly fertilizer. The government also plans to seize and shut down up to 3,000 farms to meet climate objectives. Protests by Dutch farmers have been met with force, including the police firing live ammunition rounds at protesters.
Denmark, Belgium, and Germany are considering similar nitrogen reduction policies. Both the UK and US have already put schemes into place to pay farmers not to farm. In huge areas of the Midwest, large corporations are seizing prime farmland by eminent domain to install solar farms – installations that could instead be built in sunny, arid deserts where they would not disrupt the food supply.
All of this is happening at a time when we need more food and farms, not a reduction.
In the United States, there are many small, regenerative organic farms that raise pastured meats, dairy, and poultry on perennial pastures, without the use of chemical fertilizers, using animal manure to feed the grasses in a beautiful holistic cycle that is environmentally friendly and has starkly lower methane and carbon emissions compared to industrial farming. It reduces nitrogen runoff into rivers and streams and prevents erosion. If our government truly cared about climate change and human health, bureaucrats and scientists would be visiting these farms, begging to learn how to implement their methods to save the planet. Instead, these farmers are facing increased harassment and raids by armed agents seeking to shut down their operations.
You may have heard about Amos Miller, the Amish farmer from Lancaster, Pennsylvania who has been facing persecution from the CDC, FDA, and USDA for 7 years now for the unforgivable crime of providing raw milk and farm-processed, non-USDA inspected meats to customers who know what they are getting and want it exactly that way. We’ll get into why his customers want non-USDA-inspected meats later in this series. But for now, know that such raids are frequent and are threatening our ability to access local, healthy, environmentally friendly meats and dairy.
Since 2020 there has been a significant increase in the number of unexplained fires and other events damaging farms, barns, food warehouses, food pantries, and the food supply chain in general, prompting the FBI to warn that the food system is under threat from cyberattacks.
So why is this happening? Why is our food supply being disrupted, seemingly on purpose? And who is behind this global assault on our farmers?
From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Author: Franco Terrazzano
This tax costs Canadians big time at the gas pump, on home heating bills, on the farm and at the dinner table.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling on the federal government to scrap the carbon tax in light of newly released government data showing the tax will cost the Canadian economy about $25 billion in 2030.
“Once again, we see the government’s own data showing what hardworking Canadians already know: the carbon tax costs Canada big time,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “The carbon tax makes the necessities of life more expensive and it will cost our economy billions of dollars.
“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau must scrap his carbon tax now.”
The government of Canada released modelling showing the cost of the carbon tax on the Canadian economy Thursday.
“The country’s GDP is expected to be about $25 billion lower in 2030 due to carbon pricing than it would be otherwise,” reports the Globe and Mail.
Canada contributes about 1.5 per cent of global emissions.
Government data shows emissions are going up in Canada. In 2022, the latest year of data, emissions in Canada were 708 megatonnes of CO2, an increase of 9.3 megatonnes from 2021.
The federal carbon tax currently costs 17 cents per litre of gasoline, 21 cents per litre of diesel and 15 cents per cubic metre of natural gas.
The carbon tax adds about $13 to the cost of filling up a minivan, about $20 to the cost of filling up a pickup truck and about $200 to the cost of filling up a big rig truck with diesel.
Farmers are charged the carbon tax for heating their barns and drying grains with natural gas and propane. The carbon tax will cost Canadian farmers $1 billion by 2030, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
“No matter how many times this government tries to put lipstick on the carbon tax pig, the reality is clear,” said Kris Sims, CTF Alberta Director. “This tax costs Canadians big time at the gas pump, on home heating bills, on the farm and at the dinner table. Trudeau should make life more affordable and improve the Canadian economy by scrapping his carbon tax.”
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