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Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

File between “No Sh*t Sherlock” and “You Don’t Say?”

The IMF’s “Chart of the Week” just dropped, promising a glimpse into how carbon taxes can be “less regressive”, “socially fair” and “economically efficient”.

Citing a new research paper, the chart of the week comes from research findings that carbon taxes inordinately penalize the poors,

Finding that low-income households pay anywhere between $1.26 USD  and $4.95 USD more per tonne of CO2 than the rich and affluent,

The paper is called Distributional Impacts of Heterogenous Carbon Prices in the EU and looked at European countries, however, the findings around the discrepancy apply anywhere – why?

Because “incomplete carbon price coverage in the value chain”, and numerous other references throughout the paper to that “heterogeneity” all mean the same thing:

Carbon taxes aren’t uniform across all countries, and aren’t uniformly applied across all industries – and that leaves differentials and gaps that the IMF claims are being exploited by rich people to the exclusion of low income households.

The solution? A global carbon tax.

Even better:

The EU ETS II is the European Union Emissions Trading System II, the current carbon “cap and trade” system, while the CBAM is the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism – which is an existing mechanism that tries to “adjust” the price of goods coming into the Eurozone from places where the carbon taxes aren’t high enough, or don’t exist at all.

In other words, the IMF is recommending a global carbon tax, across all industries – to alleviate carbon price “heterogeneity” (which simply means: not all the same), under the guise of helping the poor, who are disproportionately affected by carbon taxes. 🤡

“Revenue Recycling”: Turning regressive policies into progressive taxation

The paper goes on to posit that when member nations have higher carbon taxes than their trading partners – a kind of “surplus” revenue accrues – which can be redistributed to lower income households and in most cases, exceed the amount paid in carbon taxes:

In a closed economy (the models say) the carbon taxes paid across income groups would net out to zero, but we don’t really lived in a closed economy.

The result is most households will get back more than they pay in carbon taxes:

And  after a global carbon tax comes in, everybody gets back more money than they pay in, except the top decile of households.

Here in Canada, we’ve seen this movie already. It’s The Big Lie of carbon tax rebates.

The ruling Liberal/NDP coalition incessantly attacks any notion of “axing the tax” as something that would make Canadians poorer – because doing away with the reviled carbon tax would eliminate the need for rebates.

However, multiple studies including one from Canada’s own Parliamentary Budget Office in 2023 and another from the Frasier Institute in 2021 found that most Canadian households lost money, even after the rebates, IMF “models” aside.

If it were true that a uniformly applied global carbon tax could give net rebates to all but the very wealthiest households, then after we distill everything down past the climate rhetoric, what we are left with is basically an elaborately camouflaged wealth redistribution scheme called carbon communism.

That may work on whiteboard, but in reality it’ll just continue to hit low income families the hardest, as increased taxation always does (and that includes inflation).

This came into my inbox just as I was working on the upcoming issue of The Bitcoin Capitalist, and I’ll have more to say about this in there,  particularly around how I see the findings and recommendations will relate to future deployment of CBDCs (which I’ve already said, will most likely be a UBI scheme based on personal carbon emissions quotas).

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