Planet Money Presidential Platform

#1  YES, but it needs to be phased out over a significant period of time.  Lots of people (rightly or wrongly) made purchase decisions based on the assumption that the mortgage income deduction would remain.  We need to give it some time to mitigate that tax burden which, honestly, will affect the middle class the most (once you hit a certain income level that mortgage deduction starts to be reduced).

#2  Sounds OK...need to do more research on how this affects the health care system both patients and providers.

#3  Sounds great, as long as you enact #4.

#4  YES YES YES YES YES

#5  YES, but:  I think this tax needs to provide incentives to improve efficiency and reduce consumption of fossil fuels primarily as an economic trigger to move the U.S. away from the reliance on these fuels.  The local environmental benefits would be a secondary benefit.  I sincerely doubt this would provide any tangible carbon-footprint benefits globally, unless other nations followed our lead.

#6  Sure, tax the hell out of it and regulate the trade.

I can go for all of those but #5.  It will be a huge cost for very little benefit except to tax coffers.

Every time you exhale you are emitting carbon.  That's going to get pretty costly to the average american.

In all seriousness that will raise our costs to comute to and from work, to light and heat our homes, the cost of our groceries etc..  There is not a portion of your lives that do not depend on some form of carbon emitting activity.

At least that's the rationale of our panel of economists.

Taxing will misallocate the resource.  We are not at a stage yet were the alternatives are viable options.  I think the benefit does not outweigh the cost at this point in time.

But, will there ever be a good time.  Should it been done in the 60's, 70's, 80's, etc... 

Unfortunetly, my wife works 45 mintes from our home and I work 30 minutes from our home.  Could we move to the town where she is working, yes, but I cannot find a similar job in that town.  It is something we are looking for, but it is not something we can do.  We both lived in the town where we worked, but the facility was closed and the business was shipped to Mexico.

I took a job with less money and no benefits and instead of walking or biking to work we both drive.  If I started getting higher taxed that to the point where it was a serious issue for my family, I would find a job where she is working and commute by bike or by foot.

I have to agree to phase some of it out over time such as the mortgage interest deduction. Most of it Love. Granted I have been listening to it since they started so I am familiar with most of their arguements.

For #2 I am thinking it would only be beneficial if there was also a plan in place to create more affordable plans or have universal healthcare coverage. I say this because a lot of providers offer the healthcare plans because of the tax break and as an incentive to draw employees in. If you take away part of that...and they may decide to drop or drastically reduce coverage.

I listen to PM as well.  Great podcast.

#1: Yep, not everyone should own (or will own) a home.  This incentives people to try do buy when maybe they should not.

#2: Yep, insurance should not be tied to jobs.  If all corporations suddenly said "we're not providing insurance for our employees anymore" the insurance companies would be FORCED to drop rates or they would lose a huge share of their income.

#3: Yep, considering we have one of the highest corp tax rates in the world.  It would def. stimulate growth

#4: Yep.  Buy more pay more.  Flat tax / fair tax.  Whatever you want to call it.

#5: Hell no.  It's going to do more harm than good as there are no alternatives right now.  And for what?  To make the tree huggers happy..

#6: Yep.  The War on Drugs is a failure.  Legalize and tax it like alcohol.

Ah yes. FORWARD!  About as inspiring as Hope and Change.

Oh Brazil, you mean the country that is mowing down the rainforest to plant sugar cane to turn into ethanol thereby actually increasing carbon emissions?

Or Brazil the country that imports 240,000 tons of nitrogen fertilizer to grow this sugar cane that creates nitrous oxide (a greenhouse gas)?

Yeah, that Brazil.  And sugar cane is actually much better than corn ethanol, the stuff that would grow here.  So thanks, I'll keep the crude oil over that.

Oh and over $8 billion of your and my dollars have gone to "green" energy companies that have gone bankrupt.  Great success stories.

I agree we need to continue to move forward.  I do not think harming the economy in the way mentioned is the way to do it. 

Brazil's answer isn't the answer in the US.  We don't have the climate for it (tropical rain forest that we can clear-cut to grow enough cane).  We use every piece of corn for something in the US right now (feed, food, seed, oil) and alternative sources like Orange Peels are also used for livestock feed.

They have way more land than they use and a rain forest they can chop-down to plant the stuff.  Maybe if we turned the Everglades into a cane farm, we could do it to reduce a little bit of oil consumption.

Truth is that the Eagle Ford Shale and Barnett Shale have been shown to have enough oil for decades, thereby pushing-out any other solutions.

Electric cars (Fuel Cell or Battery) would be the best long-term thing IMO

Serious question here. When do we need to start moving towards alternative resources? Oil has already more than doubled in the last decade, if it doubles again to $200/barrel is that when we should start? 

We haven't started?  Really??  I don't remember any electric vehicles at all when I was your age.  This summer I stayed at a hotel that had car charging stations.  I hate to think what it requires to be considered a start.

Everyone keeps saying it's not cost effective. My point is WHEN does it become cost effective? When oil is $200 or $300? I think our economy would collapse if it even got up to $150 for an extended amount of time. We aren't anywhere near close to being able to transition off of oil and we aren't that far away from it becoming too cost prohibitive to use IMO.

Also, electric cars have been around for a long time. If you'd like to buy a car charger station, let me know. I'll make you a deal.

We should start by all means.  The first step would be allowing people to build nuke plants.  They are safer, cleaner and kill less people per year per terrawat than all but one form of power generation including wind.

With a better nuke infrastructure hybrid electrics are going to start making more sense.

And I'm all for continuing to work on solar and wind.  But not at the expense of the tax payer.  Let people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and other people with vision tackle the issue.

I wasn't talking about cellulosic ethanol.  I was talking about sugar based ethanol.

And then by all means please school me on land usage and sugar production in Brazil.  Please address the two issues I brought up.

There absolutely is a "best" time to do it, and that is when everyone else is forced to do the same thing.

People simply do not get it. We are at the top of the food chain not only because of our vast natural resources that made us a manufacturing giant... but because we had vast cheap energy to process it. We can talk all we ant about going green, and watch as China DOUBLES it's use of coal and completely destroys us. We already can't compete is labor costs and regulation costs, taxing carbon and forcing the US to go green when our competition isn't removes energy cost competitiveness. It is cutting our own throats for absolutely zero global difference in carbon emissions.

When energy sources becomes scares and price drives up costs then there will be a change. Only difference is everyone changes at the same time and the playing field remains level.

That isn't a replacement. We do not need nukes, we already have enough excess capacity at night to supply all the transportation. Problem is, we do not have the battery technology to do it. Everyone thinks of cute Prius drivers commuting to work.... so what does the trucking industry use? The shipping and rail industry? The airline industry? We can cut our consumption removing commuting from the equation. That would be a of of gas, but currently there are zero viable options to replace oil. Period.

Tony, how many more jobs will this carbon tax send out of the USA to other countries?

Were some of the unintended consequences of our ethanol incentives to increase the cost of corn based foods? Who does that hurt, the wealthy or the person trying to scape by to feed his family?

While the carbon tax sounds good, the unintended consequences hit the lower and middle class the hardest. Business will do one of two things, pass the cost onto the consumer or move to a country that is more business friendly.

There are quite a few other ways to save energy though. I work in the electrical industry and LED's are doing incredible things for reducing energy consumption. There is no instance where an LED isn't better than anything else out there. It feels to me like everyone is so anti-green energy, that they just dismiss everything immediately.