Cap and Trade is Too Taxing

Back from a week at the beach, I missed at the time this nice column in the Inky about the simplicity of a carbon tax as compared to the unnecessary complexities of cap-and-trade. The Rube Goldberg reference is a nice analogy.

The only beef I have with the article is that it didn't go far enough, stopping at simply insinuating that cap-and-trade creates all sorts of useless regulatory work instead of directly offering that that's why DC prefers it in the first place. After all, you get to look tough on the environment and create lots of work for your friends and promise something for nothing. A carbon tax, on the other hand, just sounds like something painful, you leave nothing for bureacrats to have to inspect or approve or track, and, let's be honest, it has the word "tax" in it.

As for this right-leaning pro-business capitalist pig, in this case I'm for the tax. It is, after all, the less taxing of the two options.