@HerraBRE what kind of tax regime is "normal" depends totally on where you live ;) Outside of a few Scandinavian countries, I believe the #NeoLiberal tax regime I describe is currently "normal taxes" in most places. I'd love to learn that I'm wrong about that, because it sucks.

> the poor will foot the bill

How? They can just keep buying the cheapest products available, but their custom will mostly shift to companies with eco-friendly packaging, durable, repairable products etc.

@humanetech

@strypey You just complained about sales taxes and how they hurt the poor and spare the rich, which is exactly right.

How can you then fail to see that adding the cost of waste management to the products themselves is the exact same thing, with the same dynamics?

This is fuzzy wishful thinking, advocating this is quite literally doing the neoliberals' work for them. Which given your tone, seems like something you'd prefer to avoid?

@strypey But just to clarify my position on this - I do think it would be useful to use some form of incentive so eco-friendly products have a competitive advantage. We should do that.

But I believe there are better ways to achieve that and fund this sort of thing.

You're proposing very radical changes to how retail works, why not also be radical about mostly funding it using a sane progressive tax scheme?

@strypey Fair enough. That's pretty much what I figured was driving you.

I fundamentally disagree with the whole us vs. them attitude lefties have towards businesses.

I don't see how businesses paying results in anything BUT the buck getting passed to the people, either in the form of lower pay, less jobs or more expensive products. And the "bad" businesses who deserve to be "punished" are the ones who pass the buck most effectively.

We're just going to have to agree to disagree here. 🙂

@HerraBRE @strypey I think that there is a lot that can be done to right the situation before we even get to complicated regulation or taxation regimes to "de-externalize" the costs avoided by mass manufacturing (like NZ, Canada has a regressive, complex GST so complexity isn't always a barrier to implementing something).

We already have very elaborate carbon emissions reporting and a "price on carbon" (the numbers of which are just estimates anyways but we still do it)...

@HerraBRE @strypey ...we already track production and sales of electronics and other manufactured goods more closely than carbon emissions, and it wouldn't be any more complicated to track who made what was returned for recycling.

We don't have to force manufacturers to accept obsolete and broken goods back directly but we CAN qualify a "price on disposal" just as we have a "price on carbon" which would make planned obsolescence less economically viable for them...

@msh
> would make planned obsolescence less economically viable for them...

Yes, this is the goal. I'm totally open to suggestions about the most politically realistic ways of getting there, which will likely vary from country to country. We're just spitballing here ;)
@HerraBRE

@strypey @HerraBRE I just find the discussion interesting. I look at certain things holistically and try to keep ideological bias to a minimum. Conventional means of taxing business seem to encourage investment but are largely decoupled from the actual impact/costs to society.

TBH I would be fine if businesses paid zero income tax as long as they paid the true and full costs associated with their business activities (everything from inputs to proper wages to waste disposal costs).

@clacke
> If you can't even issue your debt in your own currency, you're just a normal business with an unusual business model.

This is definitely true for local government in #NZ(city, district, and regional councils). If it's true for central governments, it has disturbing implications for human-scale government, and democracy in general.
@msh

@strypey @clacke ...the experiment did not go well. The province couldn't or wouldn't redeem prosperity certificates as promised and the Canadian supreme Court ultimately ruled that PCs were currency and only the federal gov't could issue currency and regulate banking.

Over the years most social credit practises were abandoned or struck down by courts. The Alberta Treasury Branch still exists but is basically just a government owned credit union style bank now...

@strypey @clacke ...it's hard to know if it failed on its own merits or because of external interference from the federal government to deliberately prevent it.

I kind of see where the theory was going - - kind of an economic version of the thermodynamics conservation of energy law. That said, as it is proposed by most advocates it sounds like an economic "perpetual motion machine", and the Alberta government certainly didn't account for friction or external forces lol.