Have you seen more than three images of the BP Oil Spill?

There's been talk, (surprisingly little of it) about the fact the 'mainstream media' is showing hardly any images of the actual damage the oil spill has been doing to the local flora and fauna of the Gulf. In this jarring NY Daily News article from early June, the reporters talk with a BP contractor who is seriously disturbed by what is happening down there:


""When we found this dolphin it was filled with oil. Oil was just pouring out of it. It was the saddest darn thing to look at," said a BP contract worker who took the Daily News on a surreptitious tour of the wildlife disaster unfolding in Louisiana.


""There is a lot of coverup for BP. They specifically informed us that they don't want these pictures of the dead animals. They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence. It's important to me that people know the truth about what's going on here," the contractor said.


And Finally:


"On Monday, a Daily News team was escorted away from a public beach on Elmer's Island bycops who said they were taking orders from BP."


So that's why. Here's some good coverage from the SF Gate that pretty much lays it out there. 
It's hard, when disasters of this magnitude occur, people often go searching for answers and justifications. And when none are readily available, we at least want to know that we've learned our lesson, that given the harrowing experiences we've been through (or put others though) we won't make the same mistake again. Sadly, I think there's another lesson in this perverse saga in American environmental history:


If you fuck up because the people in charge of making sure you don't are indirectly controlled partly by a group of people deeply indebted to you, since you've helped finance their campaigns, and also of many of those in charge of punishing you and cleaning up your mess, you'll successfully lobby them to put you in charge of punishing you and cleaning up your mess, with you to oversee you. And who says when you've spent enough money or time on reparations? Pretty much you do. Lesson? 






More
Oil Spill Images

in response...

..to this NY Times article entitled "Don't Fear the Invisible Tax" from yesterday, 4/21. He sums it up: "Opponents of the value-added tax complain that it is not sufficiently visible to voters, and is thereby an obstacle to responsible public spending. But in fact government spending is no lower in countries with more visible taxes." 

This may be true but completely misses the main objection to the VAT.

"This is an excellent example of the "informed discussion" surrounding taxation in America:

First, it's "all taxes are bad," versus "all taxes are good," with those particularly partial to the old liberal-conservative back and fourth  writing glibly "Did any Times contributor ever see a tax they did not like?"

But back in reality, you argue taxation's overall visibility doesn't determine gov pension contributions, so who cares?

Well, I do. The VAT is still a tax on wages, income, labor, which is inherently regressive. What about payroll taxes? Also on labor, so inherently regressive. What about the low capital gains taxes in America? On the earnings of capital, which largely accrues to the wealthier echelons, because after all, "it takes money to make money," so also regressive, because their so low in comparison to income and payroll.

 It seems the discussion takes taxation as inherently evil, if perhaps a necessary evil, and then attempts to find the least bad tax. This is the right start, as all taxes do impose a deadweight loss on society, but on different demographics of society. And even the total deadweight loss varies depending on the tax. When there's nice diagonal supply and demand curves, this is referred to as Harberger's Triangle. BUT, when the thing being taxed is completely fixed in supply, this loss to society essentially vanishes, and if that weren't enough the incidence of the tax falls on the supplier of such goods, and cannot be passed on to the consumer, or employer. What in the world is fixed and could be taxed so efficiency and justly, you say? Well, you're standing on it: land.  Wait, we already have property taxes, and they've been decreasing since the mid first half of the 20th century, they must not work very well. Well, they used to when they made up a larger portion of tax revenues, AND when they were based on the unimproved value of land; that is what it would be worth without buildings and other man-made additions. Turns out, the land value, which was not created or increased by the current owner, can very effectively be used to fund public expenditures, especially at a local level. These values, are created by increases in population, AND previous expenditure of the government: roads, schools, water supply, parks, fire and crime protection, etc, are all paid for by the community as a whole through taxation, yet are appropriated by the select few whose land has gained value because of such spending. In a nut shell, by taxing those surrounding the public improvements, the amount by which their land rose in value because of it, you can reach efficiently priced (short run marginal cost) provisioning of public goods! And on top  of this, a tax on unimproved land value (land value taxation, or LVT) encourages efficient use of the land, by untaxing improvements, and making sure the owner is productive with it, in order to pay the tax, not just buy it, build a parking lot, and wait for the value to go up and sell it. So yeah, it also curbs speculation in land/real estate. But that doesn't happen here, we've overcome irrational exuberance; oh wait, that just happened. 

And finally, for those who say, "no more taxes please," and think of LVT as just another excuse to extract the last coin from the working man's purse, think again:

the taxation on land does not add to the taxation on labor and capital, it replaces it. The average homeowner would be paying less overall taxes, because, although his property tax went up, he's no longer punished for improving the land, and his payroll and income taxes dropped correspondingly.

If it sounds to good to be true, it's because the doctrine of "neo-classical economics" has been forged intentionally and not, to bury this obvious and effective solution under the guise of advanced models increasingly not based on anything that resembles reality. Ever since Marshall, J. B. Clark, Knight, and the like started to subsume the third distinct factor of production, land, under capital, the war against land taxation began. And the fact the few these days even know about it, or it's popularizer, Henry George, who became the best-selling American author ever in the late 1800's, by selling over 3 million copies of his "Progress and Poverty," published in dozens of languages, is the greatest testament to their "success" there ever was. So, if you're down with the status quo for the next 100 years, please ignore this."

ETR in Germany, Continued: The Implementation

The first step of Germany’s ETR was to institute uniform taxation rates of road fuels and the consumption of heating oils. Electricity use was also re-taxed, as Germany had a previous ad valorem tax on electricity, with rates “differentiated between industry and households,” where the revenues “were earmarked for the subsidisation of the German coal industry,^[1] known as “Kohlepfennig.” Additionally, taxes on natural gas and light heating fuels were increased. It looked as follows:

Road Fuels:                 3.07 cents/liter

Heavy Heating Oils:   17.89 cents/ton; increase of 2.56 on existing heavy oil for heating tax, decrease of 10.23 on existing heavy oil for electricity generation tax

Electricity:                   1.02 cents/kWh

Light Heating Oils:     Increased 2.05 cents/liter; from 4.09 to 6.14 cents/liter

Natural Gas:                Increased 0.17 cents/kWh; from 0.18 to 0.35 cents/liter

No tax on the consumption of Coal

Germany Environmental Taxation Reform (ETR) History

Germany's interest in environmental tax reform was seen "as part of a more general overhaul of the tax system, [as] the German ETR was largely motivated to facilitate the allocation of production processes and demand towards technological innovation, and the creation of additional jobs.^[1]"  The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) corroborated this by reporting in 1994 that “energy consumption and unemployment would considerable decrease and unemployment would considerably decrease,[2]” approximating that 600,000 new jobs would be created over 10 years. Moreover, they found that there would no significant negative effect on GDP growth or inflation.

Solidifying the link between Land Value Taxation and Environmental Tax Reform

Full Employment, Growth And Progress On A Small Planet: Relieving Poverty While Healing The Earth 
By: Mason Gaffney
... especially Section C: "Needed Modern Adaptations," where Gaffney updates Georgist policy prescriptions beautifully, and discusses it in a way that relates directly to environmental taxation policy.
This is the link needed to build a broad and effective coalition: LVTers and ETRers finally coming together.

Slumburbia - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

From February 10th's "Slumburbia" - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com:

".......a few lessons about urban planning can be picked from the stucco pile.

One is that, at least here in California, the outlying cities themselves encouraged the boom, spurred by the state’s broken tax system. Hemmed in by property tax limitations, cities were compelled to increase revenue by the easiest route: expanding urban boundaries. They let developers plow up walnut groves and vineyards and places that were supposed to be strawberry fields forever to pay for services demanded by new school parents and park users.

The first step towards sustainability- changing values and expectations through ecotaxation policy

                With recent discussion in the United States and abroad about possible policy responses to climate change focusing on “cap and trade,” where select polluters will be issued a quota of permits corresponding to a maximum amount of carbon dioxide, and the ability to trade them among themselves to work out the least possible cost of abatement, now is an excellent time to look at deeper reforms, reforms that address the fundamental issues and causes of our current crisis in a way that sets our economy, and indeed our society and civilization as a whole, on the right long-term track. Instead of attempting to mitigate the end result (too much CO2), we need to examine what actions and practices got us here, and what else needs to be addressed beyond CO2 in order to stabilize the earth’s climate, and have a truly sustainable society.

Let's talk about the Steady State Economy

Triple sustainability- economic, environmental, and social- is the goal; we know that. The real question and quest then, is the means. The idea of a "steady state" economy, "popularized" (because, let's be honest, revolutionary ideas that challenge the status quo and corresponding vested interests are rarely ever popular, and this one is no exception) by economist Herman Daly, succinctly summarizes the necessary ideas and policies behind these elusive means in a way that presents a rather utopic image of what a truly sustainable paradigm would look like.
A brief literature review that hits on some of the key points follows.

Introductions and Motivations......

In my weekly Senior project meetings, I am constantly reminded that more than anything else, such an undertaking as this is meant to exhibit the knowledge and skills in the discipline of economics, that I’ve acquired over my four years at Bard College. This seemingly obvious goal has become increasingly problematic the more research I do, as the thesis that evolves endogenously from this process into the firm belief that the “scientific basis” of our current economic paradigm, from academia to Washington, most often called “the neo-classical synthesis,” is inherently wrong, directly contradicts the majority of what I have learned in economics classes at Bard.

Moreover, one of the major reasons this paradigm has been perpetuated even in the face of insurmountable evidence against it, is the very departmentalization of knowledge at virtually all institutional levels, but especially in academia, that gives rise to the need to express one’s proficiency in the specific discipline of economics after completing the four years of study required to obtain a degree in the first place. Just as mainstream economics attempts to fit any problems that require policy response into its language and mathematical models , college students are required to specialize their interests into one (or perhaps at most two, in the case of a duel-major) of the predefined disciplines, regardless of how well that isolated set of knowledge, principles, and tools is equipped to deal with the complex issues that face our society and civilization.

When it comes to issues of sustainability- economic, environmental, and social, as all are inherently and intractably related- and specifically the role of the economy within the ecosystem and how it relates to global climate change, an interdisciplinary approach is more important than ever before. Economics, as well as most other relevant disciplines, are essentially committing to a failed policy response by not reevaluating how their underlying assumptions are either corroborated or disproven by other overlapping disciplines’ implications of its most basic assumptions. The need for such a rethinking should be obvious even before examining the evidence, just by looking at mainstream economics’ dismal record in maintaining anything near a “sustainable environment,” and the inherent values embodied by the logic in the counter-argument that it is maintaining an economically ideal level of environmental destruction based on individual, private-based decision-making reflected through flawless pricing mechanisms.

Everyone dealing with issues that have been delegated to “economics,” implicitly (environmental policy) or explicitly (wealth distribution) need to accept the fact that far from being amoral, our current economic system is full of value and moral judgments, all of which endogenously affect consumer preferences and definitions of utility. Specifically, the neo-classical synthesis’ system is based on the assumption of, and consequently biased toward, the idea of universal, “self-interested individuals,” commonly referred to as “selfish,” and in reference to its relation to the system as a fundamental assumption, the telling, “fully rational;” a very self-defining term indeed. A new assumption of “bounded rationality” that incorporates such other motivations as altruism, community, and more generally the concept of “group selection” borrowed from evolutionary biology, is the most fundamental change needed, and as it’s necessary to incorporate it into economics on the basic, theoretical level, such a shift will have far-reaching implications.

This is not the only change needed, far from it; but it’s hard to overstate the radically different economic reality that immerges from such an intuitive assumption change.

Only by starting with the problem of global climate change, and working backwards, realizing our current economic system’s fundamental unsustainability, did I come to the conclusion that the discipline’s basic assumptions need to be revised in order to successfully fulfill its role, given the enormous responsibilities that society has imparted to it.

As I’ve delved deeper into this conflict between our current economic system and our natural environment, the process has taken me through many layers of reform:

from internalizing externalities through the Coase theorem, to envisioning the economic system within the ecological system, and from there to thinking about the Laws of thermodynamics and energy and entropy flow, to the theoretical and practical applications of such a rethinking, which took me by natural resource accounting in physical terms, to explicitly energy-based value systems, or entropy-based value systems, and focusing on limiting throughput, population, consumption, incorporating equitable distribution and sustainable scale along with efficient allocation as explicit goals for economics, to finally looking at what underlying assumptions would need to be reconsidered in order to develop the microeconomic theory that’s more consistent with this reality and the necessary steady-state/sustainable goals and thus better inform policy to deal with our most pressing problems, concluding that a severely bounded-rationality assumption that takes into account altruism, co-evolutionary theory where different systems, like humans’ economic and cultural, micro and macro, influence each other’s evolution and underlying assumptions and lead to radically different policy prescriptions than under our current economic paradigm.

By explicitly defining these other than self-interested motivations in humans on the micro level, as well as how they’re informed and influenced by the system(s) at the macro level (whereas neo-classical economics generally assumes the micro is exogenously determined and in the aggregate make up the macro dynamics, with no reverse influence), a new set of relationships between actors will emerge and come to the forefront of the theory, and create a legitimate framework to deal with community-wide issues, where group-selection mentalities exist, and indeed are necessary to achieving and implementing policies that will maximize the common good.

And by creating/strengthening the institutions that are necessary in helping aggregate these motivations into a coherent force, this process can be significantly sped up by integrating the new paradigm’s values into society, and serve as a real-world complimentary action to further legitimize the new theoretical foundations. Also by putting these institutions in the context of the codynamics of power relations and institutions, specifically environmental, the nature of enforcement mechanisms and behavior-altering actions can be further explored and explicitly employed to further institutionalize on a larger societal/cultural level the existing other-than-self-interested motivations that will be incorporated into the microeconomic theory.