A Simple Solution to Simultaneously Lower Income Taxes, Create Economic Growth, & Save the Planet

Tax and fine polluters!

The practice of reducing income taxes while increasing levies for air, water, and soil pollution--has swept nations from Singapore to Sweden, said Brown, a pioneer in the merging of economics and ecology. He called it ''environmental tax shifting''; in many countries it also is referred to as environmental tax reform.

Tax Gasoline before the corporations raise the profit margin so high that they take the lion's share of the inevitable rise in price !

Germany and Sweden lead Western Europe in environmental tax reform. By 2001, a four-year plan adopted by Germany in 1999 had lowered fuel use by five percent, said Brown. It also accelerated growth in the renewable energy sector, creating some 45,400 jobs by 2003 in the wind industry alone. Brown, citing industry figures, said he expected the figure to rise to 103,000 new jobs by 2010.

In 2001, Sweden launched a 10-year environmental tax shift designed to convert some $3.9 billion of taxes from income to environmentally destructive activities. The average household has seen its income tax bill reduced by around $1,100.

That burden has not disappeared. Rather, it has shifted to vehicle and fuel taxes--a central plank of Sweden's plan to be free of oil use by 2025.

The sensible conclusion:

Some 2,500 economists, including eight Nobel Prize winners, also have endorsed the concept of environmental tax shifts.

Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw wrote in Fortune magazine: ''Cutting income taxes while increasing gasoline taxes would lead to more rapid economic growth, less traffic congestion, safer roads, and reduced risk of global warming--all without jeopardizing long-term fiscal solvency.''

The alternate conclusion:

. . . a quote from Oystein Dahle, a former vice president of Exxon for Norway and the North Sea. ''Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth,'' Dahle said. ''Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.'

This is the least we should do RIGHT NOW to slow our destruction of our own species and thousands of others along with it.