Taxing raw materials instead of labor would incentivize more sustainable practices, but the unintended consequence is that it would disproportionately affect people lower in societies social hierarchy. If you are a truck driver or construction contractor (blue collar) your productivity depends on resource consumption. Whereas if you are in finance or software (white collar), your productivity will not be affected by your consumption, aside from the purchase of a new computer every few years. We would be giving up our progressive tax system. If you tried to keep elements of a progressive tax system, the rich would shift their consumption to the poor who would be taxed less for raw material consumption and we’d have very similar incentives to today, though with more wealth shifting to the poor. You could do a rebate program, where people with lower incomes get paid back the money they would have made without the tax system, but now we’re talking about setting up a bureaucracy to do means testing on significant proportions of the population, who would be least likely to take advantage of tax loopholes. I’m trying to think of ways to keep this idea from being a regressive tax, but I’m failing. Anyone have wisdom?