This tax magically cleans the environment at the same time. But not everything is like it has been explained.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
The tweet was clear: \u201cStarting today, we\u2019re making big polluters pay, and giving the money right back to Canadians \u2013 to keep our communities clean and healthy, and make your life more affordable.\u201d The announcement came directly from Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau on April 1.<\/p>\n
What is the point of this new federal carbon pricing scheme? Or, more importantly from a political perspective, what does Prime Minister Trudeau claim is the point?<\/p>\n
The idea is that the carbon tax is a sort of punishment for all the big, bad corporations out there that are thoughtlessly polluting our environment with their nasty emissions.<\/p>\n
The tax is then taken from those meanies and given to you, the little guy. It\u2019s like a Robin Hood tax, except there\u2019s an added bonus \u2013 it magically cleans the environment at the same time. Who could dispute such an idea?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s just\u00a0one problem. This view is not entirely accurate.<\/p>\n
For starters, there is no way to confirm that the money a Canadian household has actually shelled out is equivalent to the amount they\u2019ll get back by claiming the rebate on their taxes.<\/p>\n
The tax is going to raise the price of gas by about four cents per liter. What nobody knows is how other emitters and producers are going to respond to these increased costs and to what degree they will pass them off to the consumer.<\/p>\n
The plot thickened further following\u00a0a recent report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) on the costs and returns of the carbon tax.<\/p>\n
The PBO endorses Trudeau\u2019s broad claim that the tax will leave some people better off. \u201cThe net benefits are broadly by income group,\u201d the report notes. \u201cThat is, lower-income households will receive larger net transfers than high-income households.\u201d<\/p>\n
But they do not address the issue of how this can be proven on a specific, individual level \u2013 because it can\u2019t. More to the point, they reveal it\u2019s not the case that the burden will be shouldered by \u201cmaking big polluters pay.\u201d<\/p>\n
They look at all the cash the carbon tax will rake into federal coffers and calculate that \u201chousehold consumption of energy and non-energy products will generate three-quarters of carbon pricing revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Where\u2019s the money coming from? It\u2019s coming from the taxpayer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This tax magically cleans the environment at the same time. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21210,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[2039,2040,2037,98,1385,2038,701],"class_list":["post-21208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-canadas-robin-hood-tax","tag-canadas-taxes","tag-carbon-tax","tag-ceo-north-america","tag-ceo-northam","tag-tax","tag-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21208"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21216,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21208\/revisions\/21216"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}