Tax Shift: How to Help the Economy, Improve the Environment, and Get the Tax Man Off Our Backs (New Report) - Softcover

Durning, Alan Thein; Bauman, Yoram; Gussett, Rachel; Northwest Environment Watch (Organization)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1886093075 ISBN 13: 9781886093072

Publisher: Sightline Inst, 1998

Book by Durning, Alan Thein, Bauman, Yoram, Gussett, Rachel, Northwest Environment Watch (Organization)

From the Publisher:

Number 7 in Northwest Environment Watch’s series of short, hard-hitting books on creating a sustainable society.

From the Author:

In the other Washington, there’s talk of scrapping the federal tax code. And, if you’ve just completed your return, it’s no myserty why. The Internal Revenue Code runs to 7.5 million words and occupies, with the regulations that interpret it, one and one-half feet of shelf space. A half million earn their living deciphering it for us commoners.

But complexity is not the worst fault of our revenue system, nor is the federal tax the only flawed one. The biggest, and least discussed, problem in taxdom is this: We tax the wrong things.

When you tax something, you get less of it. That’s the stuff of Economics 101. So what do we tax?

Mostly, we tax things we want more of, such as paychecks and enterprise, not things we want less of, such as pollution and resource depletion. Naturally, we get less money and more messes.

Doing the opposite would yield double dividends: cleaner air and flusher bank accounts. In our new book “Tax Shift,” Northwest Environment Watch researcher Yoram Bauman and I discuss how to tax “bads” rather than “goods” in the Pacific Northwest.