Trash haulers must pay tipping fees for dumping into most municipal dumps. Their trucks are weighed at the entrance to the dump, and the fee is applied. Is it possible to do the same for dumping into the trash dump of the sky?
In our times, trash tipping fees aren’t controversial. It makes sense for trash haulers to pay for the space they take in our city’s dump. The tipping fees collected by the city enable the city to build new dumps when the current ones fill up. Those new dumps have liners to prevent leachate from fouling ground water. The best of them have methane collectors that turn trash into treasure, heating homes and powering factories rather than fouling the air.
Customers of the trash haulers can hardly complain about the tipping fee being added to their bills. It’s their trash, after all, that’s filling the dump, so it’s appropriate for the trash hauler to pass that cost along to their customers. Customers are incentivized to reduce, reuse and recycle because, by doing so, they can reduce their trash hauling bills.
Conservatives cotton to these tipping fees because they fit with bedrock principles of accountability. Progressives find tipping fees acceptable, too.
Back in the 1950 and 1960s when cities started charging tipping fees it was a different story. “Craziest thing I ever heard of, charging people to dump trash in the dump,” wags might have said back then. Given the times, some likely declared it to be “communism,” although the link to Lenin was surely a stretch.
In 2024 you’d be hard pressed to find someone objecting to tipping fees for city dumps. Might a tipping fee for greenhouse gas emissions be the first and most obvious thing to do about climate change?
Economists are already on that. It’s hard to find an economist who doesn’t say that a tipping fee for the trash dump of the sky is obviously good policy. I once asked a senior economist at Virginia Tech to give me the name of an economist who might disagree with that concept. He sat back in his chair and thought for a minute. “Can’t think of one,” he said. “In fact, you can’t be an economist if you disagree with that concept. It would be like being a scientist and not believing in the scientific method.”
Much will be said about Kamala Harris proposing a carbon tax when she ran for president in 2020. The Trump campaign will likely call it something close to communism. It may start to sound like the 1950s and 1960s all over again. But what should actual conservatives think about a carbon tax?
If a carbon tax is paired with a dollar-for-dollar reduction in other taxes, climate change could be addressed without growing government. In government speak, that’s “revenue neutrality.”
One pathway to this revenue neutrality is through a reduction in payroll taxes. Those FICA taxes fund Social Security. FICA really socks it to low-income workers. It’s a 12.4% tax (6.2% employee; 6.2% employer) on the first dollars of income. By reducing payroll taxes and replacing that revenue with a carbon tax, Social Security would get a broader tax base, and low-income workers would be shielded from the otherwise regressive impact of a naked carbon tax. Actual conservatives can rally to that protection of low income workers because it substantiates right-of-center rhetoric about upward mobility and of making work pay.
“Border adjustability” is the other key to making a carbon tax successful. America can get the world in on a carbon tax by applying the tax at our borders. By collecting the carbon tax on entry of goods to this, the most attractive consumer market in the world, the border adjustment would make it in the interest of trading partners to enact the same carbon tax. Otherwise, those trading partners would be forking over to the United States a tax that they could have collected themselves. The tipping fee for dumping into the trash dump of the sky would go worldwide, and free enterprise would deliver innovation at speed and scale as greener becomes cheaper compared to dirty made accountable.
In 2024 a tipping free for dumping into the trash dump of the sky may seem somewhat controversial. Fifty years from now, it will be as obvious as the tipping fee at the municipal dump.
