Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
...A higher tax on incandescent lights that makes the price at the register closer to, or more than the "green" lights, a progressive tax on gasoline so the more you buy the higher the tax rate gets, triple the price of cigarettes to discourage their use.
BOb
|
While I agree with some points and disagree with others, and although I understand where your thoughts are on this and the reasons behind them, I've got to say where would the taxing stop on things we want to discourage or don't like, or are for
our own good?
And who gets to decide? If we follow this particular idea of taxing gas more, triple the price of cigarettes . . . well, I think then that we need to quadruple the price of alcohol, fast foods, fatty foods, sugary drinks, perfume (for those that douse themselves in it 'til you can't breathe when you're around them,) all manner of evil things, or just things we believe are not good for the individual, the town, the state, the country, the world. And once again, who decides, and where does it stop? How about charging residential trash pickup by the bag, so you're discouraged from making trash. True, I'm sure there is too much waste in every household and we should recycle more, but would the answer be to possibly charge say $10 for each 13-gallon bag of trash, $25 for 33-gallons, etc? A progressive trash tax sounds good to me. At the very least we'll all get trash compactors to be more space efficient, which is good. But then someone would want to start charging by weight instead.
And how about taxing people for having children instead of giving them
tax breaks? More children mean a higher demand on resources of every kind. How do you measure the cost-to-benefit ratio of children.
We ALL contribute to the problem in some way, but we're not ALL villains either. We just can't keep taxing more and more and think it will force behavior changes enough to save the world.