Friday, June 20, 2008

What Will Happen to Dion's Spending Promises if Carbon Emissions Go Down??

If Dion's Green Shift ever comes to be enacted (and I certainly hope it does not), I'm wondering how he would continue to pay for his spending promises if carbon emissions decline.

When announcing his plan yesterday, Dion made several spending initiatives (which do not count as tax cuts), such as their child tax benefit, their larger working income tax benefit, etc. The money to pay for these spending initiatives is supposed to come out of the revenue raised by the carbon tax. These are expensive initiatives that need large sums of cash in order to be paid for.

Even though the carbon tax would escalate over four years, what would happen if Canadians become so good at reducing their carbon output that not enough revenue is gathered??

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Further to that, if Dion introduces is Green Shi.(f)t Which is another Trudeau era NEP: Alberta will probably respond with a reduction in exploration and development resulting in less oil and natural gas being produced in Canada: The shortfall on the world market will have to filled by other Oil exporting countries (opec)who now have a hammer to hold over the head of western nations, these opec nations will not increase production to cover this shortfall thereby driving up the demand for oil & gas and ultimately driving up the price of carbon products, gasoline, natural gas diesel etc. Good plan Stephie; just like your clarity act.

Rich

wilson said...

The obvious answer is the carbon tax will continue to rise. It has to to cover the goodies.
dion neatly tied it to social programs, it would be a permanent tax used as a vehicle to fund all the socialist programs.

How much will the carbon price climb to? Well try $200, generating 100 billion $$ by 2020

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/latestnews/dsfnews02250802.asp

'...The Foundation’s new report asserts that:
• A phased-in carbon price would generate at least $50 billion, and as much as $100 billion, in revenue by 2020...'

from that report:

''The all-in-one package is in a report by Prof. Jaccard, of Simon Fraser University, for the David Suzuki Foundation. Titled Pricing Carbon: Saving Green, the report ran through some economic modelling exercises to see what might happen if Canada were to impose a tax on all carbon emissions of between $75 and $200 a tonne by 2020. ''