Here's why I don't like the idea of a Canadian Carbon tax.
First of all the term "Revenue Neutral" is cod swallop. If you increase the price of transportation and heating fuels, the price of everything increases. You can show on paper how you're only transferring the money from one place to another, and giving supposed relief in one place as you tax another, but history tells us there's a difference between what you show on paper, and what happens in the real world.
Wealthier families may be paying only 4% of their income heating their homes, but poorer families average out to 19%.
A survey of homeless families in Colorado showed heating costs was the second most common reason given for families hitting the streets.
Sure these guys get a cut in their income tax if a carbon tax comes in, but income tax was never their problem. Now they have not only added fuel and heating costs, but the added cost of living increases which come with fuel and heating price increases. Everything from food to bus fares gets more expensive.
One might say, well that's just the poor, what do I care, but once you legitimize the idea of government controls on the illusory, hobgoblin of global warming other controls follow which turn the middle class into the working poor. Cap n trade is this insidious device which turns bureaucrats into power brokers. The rich find ways to exploit the system to their advantage, but as the cost of it is shuffled around small business finds itself paying for the plan. Cap n trade follows a Carbon tax.
And speaking of bureaucracies new ones are created to shuffle the government controls about. New things are found to control. You were talking about Britain.
Here's an article on how new controls have appeared on how much garbage you can have picked up. Apparently if your containers are too full now, you get a massive fine, and a possible criminal record.
Once these new bureaucracies are established you never get rid of them. They might shuffle around a bit, but they'll always be there.
Basically what a carbon tax is really about is creating new political power centers where money can be moved about in a way that's less transparent to award the right influence groups. It's money laundering.
And the worse thing is all this is being done to supposedly battle a problem that probably doesn't exist. When you actually look for the supposed scientific consensus on global warming it turns out it can't be found. The "consensus", it turns out is really a political one of policy makers, and a smattering of purchased scientists. There's no real world scientific proof supporting the idea of a coming catastrophe, as a result of human caused global warming. There's more actual support from real world science for a coming cooling from natural climate causes.
