Comment by Loudergood
Comment by Loudergood a day ago
The real hardship for the poor here is they cannot float that $1/gallon for a year before getting the $1000
Comment by Loudergood a day ago
The real hardship for the poor here is they cannot float that $1/gallon for a year before getting the $1000
That doesn't make sense because the second hand car is not cheaper by the amount of the subsidy. Say subsidy is $20k, second-hand car might eventually be $6k cheaper (and the discount time value of money means that the $6k is actually less than $4k). Giving the wealthy person $20k, and the poor person less than $4k is strange.
New Zealand used car market is likely very different from the market where you are. The cheapest Model 3 I could find was a USD18000 for a 2020.
Subsidies make sense if the environmental gains outweigh the costs of the subsidies.
Subsidies: there was a purchase subsidy, charging stations were subsidised, and I think electric cars are not paying their fair share of road maintenance (much of our road costs are paid for by an excise tax on usage via petrol-tax or heavy-vehicle-milage).
That math doesn’t add up. If I buy a $100,000 car for $80,000, and I sell it to someone for $60,000, the recipient still gets a $40,000 discount.
And if you pretend that there is no subsidy, and the original owner paid $80,000 just because it cost that much unsubsidized, the second buyer still gets the same discount off the original purchase price.
So the fact that the car was originally subsidized isn’t relevant.
The rebate can be paid out more frequently than annually.
Having a carbon tax seems to be the most fair way to combat climate change; unfortunately in practice it is political suicide. Australia had a carbon tax in 2011 and was quickly repealed in 2014. Likewise Canada also implemented such a tax in 2019 and was repealed this year prior to their election. People like to say that they want to help the environment, but when it comes time to vote they vote against such policies.
The Australian implementation had a lot of problems. Instead of being (something reasonably loophole free like) a tax levied on fossil fuel consumption it was a scheme that applied to the 500 largest emitters. These emitters then (crucially) estimated their own emissions minus offsets and paid tax on that.
The issue with this is that it creates a whole parallel (and largely fake) carbon accounting world. Fake estimates, fake offsets, a complex web of compensating subsidies - but real public money.
The field of carbon taxes is tricky because we can imagine simple schemes which handle a few scenarios in a fair way (ok, fuel! we know how to tax that) but once you start thinking about agriculture or construction you quickly get into complex estimation. You then end up with armies of carbon accountants who spend all day looking for loopholes and rorts.
Canada ultimately repealed the carbon tax because it was used as a political cudgel against the Liberal party that enacted it by the Conservative opposition in a sustained fashion for several years.
Which is dismaying because carbon taxes are a conservative solution to this problem and IIRC the first political entities to suggest the implementation of them in Canada were Conservative.
At the end of the day you have a nontrivial amount of the population, and many in positions of power who just outright deny environmental concerns and climate change as an existential threat.
They aren't going to approach this problem in good faith and it isn't obvious what the solution to their nefarious influence on policy should be.
Canada's implementation had two problems:
1. The textbook implementation involves 3 parts: tax, rebate and tariff. Canada only did the first 2. They were in talks with Germany/EU to create a carbon tariff zone, but that never happens. Without the tariff the carbon tax is massively unfair to local producers.
2. The rebates were almost invisible. If they would have been cheques in the mail it would have had much more impact psychologically.
But I agree, the main problem was denialism and its use as a political cudgel. It should be hard to argue that carbon tax is stealing money when all of it is given back, but they successfully did that.
The same thing happened with electric car purchase incentives in New Zealand. The poor cannot afford to buy a new car - so only the well off received the efficient car discount incentives.
The trickle down as those cars depreciated in value was years away.