Recycling
Jeff Smith: Sharing
Natural Rents to Sustain Human Society
1. Materials -
Extraction vs. Recycling
- Rent: The light levy on the value of
resources in
the raw, government vitiates that with depletion allowances. Plus,
government accepts under-market bids for leases of publicly owned
pastures and deposits. Getting to keep Rent makes extracting virgin
materials extra remunerative; recycling used materials, wherein Rent
does not even exist, has no such gratis profit.
- Taxes: The tax on sales complicates
business. One
must do extra bookkeeping or hire an accountant; an easier burden upon
entrenched firms than upon startups, such as a store to sell ap-tech
(the products that consume fewer resources) so every home can be an
eco-home. Being sneakily regressive, the tax nibbles away at would-be
customers' discretionary income.
- License: The price of raw materials does not
include all the costs from the loss of habitat, other species, sources
of new medicines, the downwind and downstream costs from tailings, etc,
disadvantaging recyclers.
- Subsidy: Government logging roads and way
under-market leases favor loggers and miners, not selective harvesters
and recyclers.
To sustain that which we love,
we must transform our relationships
to nature, to government, and to each other. We need to become
geonomists in worldview, theory, discipline, and policy. Geonomics
creates an economy that's not at war with but aligned with the
natural world.... Read the whole article
Jeff Smith: Share Rent, Transform Society
It is not just collecting ground rent but
also untaxing other systems. Untax labor and make it more affordable. Enterprises
such as recycling and reforestation, weatherization, reconstruction, and
health enterprises are labor intensive and made more expensive artificially
by taxing labor. We subsidize business: free roads for the timber industry,
cheap water for agribusiness. Stop those subsidies and recycling could compete.
On a level field, recycling would roll over extraction of virgin material. We
could spare forests and salmon and have a healthier eco system. Look at restoration.
Money has to come from the public treasury but we could look at it as public
investment. Pay for restoration and land values increase, so land dividends would
increase. Direct investment benefits the entire
public.
Now the public is paying for private parties.
That is not fair. Look at the economy. Take taxes off homes, and
they become more affordable. Have some kind of land charge, and housing
stock
increases as sites get developed. Affordable housing helps stabilize
neighborhoods. In places that do have the land tax, i.e., Australia and
New Zealand, they
have fewer disputes with assessment. Assessors say their job is so much
easier now. If land is less profitable and less of a political football,
it is less
tense in local politics. ... read the whole article
|
To
share this page with a friend: right click, choose "send," and
add your comments.
|
|
Red
links have not been visited; .
Green
links are pages you've seen |
Essential Documents
pertinent to this theme:
essential_documents |
|