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Comment by slopeloaf | Hacker News Reader

I empathize with this and your earlier obviously inflammatory remarks, but we either pay for adaptation/mitigation now or pay billions if not trillions later for infrastructure repairs, more human lives lost, further extinctions of animal biodiversity, and reduced economic productivity from the loss of arable land.

Taxing large emitters does still past the cost down to the consumer. Someone certainly has to pay eventually. Perhaps youre too cynical to believe humans now are willing to do so. I don’t think youre right, but it’s certainly an opinion those less optimistic share :) and there is plenty of current evidence to bring hopes down.

Alas I’d like to die knowing I tried and cared instead of contributing to the apathy of the situation.

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Every(?) western nation is going through a cost of living crisis.

And some people believe increasing the cost of energy is a solution to anything.

There's one obvious solution to everyone's cost of living crisis: tax the wealthy fairly.

We'll send modern civilization off a cliff before we do it, but it isn't like we don't know the solution.

I hear this often, but I'm struggling to understand how taxing the wealthy will build houses, or lower the price of energy?

Taxing the wealthy does one thing very well: transfer money from the hands of the wealthy, who are notoriously good at managing their wealth, in to the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who are notoriously bad at managing other peoples money.

The way the wealthy "manage their wealth" is by buying up assets (including housing, etc) driving up the price for everyone else causing exactly this sort of cost of living crisis you referenced.

Not really that difficult to understand. You should read up on the history of US taxation and how much stronger the middle class was when the wealthy got taxed fairly.

You could not have agreed with my point more clearly. You don’t want to pay more, you want to force everyone richer than you to pay more. That’s the problem.

I want them to pay the same amount I do as a percentage of their earnings. But they don't, they pay far less as a percentage of their earnings. THAT's the problem.

If you seized every billionaire’s money the government would be financed for less than a year. If you want sustainable taxation to finance your climate agenda you need to convince everyone to pay more. But people won’t do it unless you pitch it as a free lunch.

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