Hammond, M. Jeff; DeCanio, Stephen J.; Duxbury, Peggy; Sanstad, Alan H.; Stinson, Christopher H.
Abstract
There has been a great deal of discussion regarding the use of fiscal policies to encourage environmental conservation, and many such tax policies have been implemented at the local level in the United States and in some European countries. While such proposals take many forms, the premise of most is that government should tax more heavily those activities it most wants to discourage and tax less heavily the behaviors it wants to promote. These two chapters argue that to those ends government should reduce taxes on labor, innovation, and capital formation and replace those revenues with new taxes or fees on pollution and waste. Such a change could be called a “resource-based tax shift.”
