Sin Taxes Come to San Francisco

It's good to know that the most perverted city in America has finally found something sinful and is determined to tax it. That would be, in the case of Frisco and the surrounding communities of the Bay Area, carbon emissions.

Officials Approve Controversial Greenhouse Gas Tax - News Story - KTVU San Francisco SAN FRANCISCO -- Air pollution regulators in the San Francisco Bay area voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to approve new rules that impose fees on businesses for emitting greenhouse gasses. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District's board of directors voted 15-1 to charge companies 4.4 cents per ton of carbon dioxide they emit, an agency spokeswoman said. Experts say the fees, which cover nine counties in the Bay Area, are the first of their kind in the country. The new rules are set to take effect July 1. The modest fee probably won't be enough to force companies to reduce their emissions, but backers say it sets an important precedent in combating climate change and could serve as a model for regional air districts nationwide.

I used to wonder how deep a hole the Bay Area and California were willing to dig for themselves when it came to sound fiscal planning and competitiveness in the global marketplace. Now I know there is no bottom to it.

Two items in the above report stand out.

The first is the base concept that 1) global warming is real and 2) it is caused by CO2 and 3) that human generated CO2 is significant and 4) wiping out CO2 emissions in the Bay Area, or California, or the United States entire, does anything significant at all. That entire chain of assumptions is being shown, day by day, to be deeper and deeper bullshit.

The second is the labeling of this 4.4 cents per ton sin tax as "modest." Taken as an "eternally fixed" tax it might well be "modest" even if the sheer existence of such a tax is confiscatory. But when was the last tax born that stayed at the level announced? Never happens. I'm looking towards the day when the drool-cup wearing pols that SF elects look around the entire world and say, "Say there, still carbon dioxide around. We must not be taxing it enough! What say we tax it more? Say, $5.00 per ton."

Why any business that makes anything other than "Drool Cups for Californians" would want to stay in or re-locate to this part of the map is beyond me. On second thought, you could probably outsource the making of Golden State Drool Cups to Myanamar.

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Posted by Vanderleun at May 23, 2008 6:59 AM | TrackBack
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