The Green Tax Shift

John Fisher, Frank DeJong and John Ikerd

[Reprinted from GroundSwell, March-April 2009]

The following panel was presented July 12, 2008 at the Council of Georgist Organizations held in Kansas City, MO. The write-up is from an audio recording and notes by GroundSwell editor Nadine Stoner. John Fisher is a member of the Green Party of Ontario, and former candidate for Member of Parliament. Frank de Jong is the Leader of the Green Party of Ontario, Canada. Dr. John Ikerd is a professor emeritus, University of Missouri. Panel moderator Alanna Hartzok is the author of the book, The Earth Belongs to Everyone.

JOHN FISHER

The subject is Green Tax Shift. It is encouraging to know that it is actually happening and some of our Georgist Green ideas are getting out to the world and particularly in Canada in terms of the Carbon Tax. The province of British Columbia implemented a carbon tax on July 1 of this year (2008). It was interesting to see what was happening before and after its implementation. British Columbia was the first jurisdiction in North America to bring in a carbon tax of about 2%, in terms of carbon, which is going to increase over the next 2-3 years to 6%. The first day the price of gasoline increased 2.4 cents a liter. And as this percent increases over the next 2-3 years, the tax on gasoline will increase accordingly.

When things like this are happening, timing is everything. Public opinion polls were showing a majority of BC-ers were in favor of this tax to happen, and that was good for the Liberal Party, of course. As it got closer to the day, the opposition who really should have favored it, the NDP - New Democratic party on the socialist side - opposed it. They called it a gas tax instead of a carbon tax, and the polls showed the support for the tax down. The government made it a revenue neutral tax. To make it revenue neutral, the
provincial government sent out $100 to every man, woman, and child and took some taxes off wages, businesses, and other things. They honestly want to make it revenue neutral. It is being brought in by a political party. The trust is not there for political action. You know how people feel about political promises. There was a lot of mistrust and that is why the Liberals went down in the polls. While they are bringing in a carbon tax, they have put all kinds of money into building new roads, things that are just contrary to what the carbon tax is supposed to achieve. Then world prices of oil went up, and the opposition claimed this would reduce carbon use. The NDP brought out the disadvantage between rural people and urban people, and the fact that rural people need gas more to get around and do things.

At the federal level the Liberal Party also included a carbon tax in their platform. Again this policy (and the personal leadership of Stephane Dion) were attacked by the Conservatives and New Democrats.

(In the election since this was written the Conservatives formed a minority government and the Greens under leader Elizabeth May failed to elect one MP in spite of getting almost one million votes or 6% of the vote.)

FRANK DE JONG.

A number of years ago I got involved with the Green party. We started out as a pressure group. Later on we realized as a political party we have to run candidates. We started running candidates and then people would say, what is your economic program. In fact, we didn't have an economic program, because we were a bunch of tree huggers, but people kept voting for us nonetheless. So we decided we need to have an economic program; we are a political party, and we aspired to be government, and so somebody came up with this slogan, Tax Bads, Not Goods.

This was basically our economic program for about 10 years. It is simplistic, but it is compelling. Then we said, what is bad and what is good? Obviously pollution is bad, so we are going to tax pollution. What is good? What do we not want to tax? We don't want to tax a standing forest or a functioning farm. And we started getting more sophisticated. This started happening not just in Ontario but also around the world. But then the notion of tax shifting came along. People like Mike Nickerson and myself started talking abut tax shifting. Then John Fisher got me involved with the Georgists and I got clued in that the Henry George movement had been tax shifting for a hundred years already. The Henry George movement is the collective body of knowledge of tax shifting that the Green Party needed in the worst way. At a Georgist conference a few years ago I characterized the Green Party as a body with no head, and the Georgists as a head with no body. The Georgists have all answers but we don't know how to get it out there. The GreenParty has access to all kinds of people; every few years in an election we get thousands of people, but we needed to know what to say. There is a wonderful synergy happening between the Green Party and Georgists around the world, not just in Ontario. So more and more Greens are tuning to the Georgist idea, and there is a huge debate happening now on carbon taxes in Canada.

I put this Slide Show put together because I was invited by the Georgists in Australia. The irony is that when I was in Australia, I spoke mostly to Green Party people, even though it was the Georgists that paid the tab.

In the Green Party we don't want regulations, we don't want big government; we want to set the market system so that it will get us to a sustainable society without government micromanaging. The Libertarians might applaud that, so there is a Libertarian element in the Green party because of our belief in a properly structured market system.

The basic question is about capital, labor, and resources. What are resources? I put land in there, because most Greens would never include land as a resource. Somehow Greens assume land is separate, but obviously that is main challenge we have as Greens to include land in the definition of resources. But Greens usually understand that land is a resource when I explain that sprawl results from under priced land, just as climate change results from under priced oil and coal. Right pricing land through Land Value Taxation would address sprawl.

It is self-evident to every Green, and should be self-evident to every human, that we have a finite planet and that we have critical problems of resources, pollution, and social inequity still, etc. So we need an economic program that addresses these problems. That is where tax shifting comes in. This little booklet by Alan Durning came out of the Sierra Club, and it only mentions land once. It says in a municipal setting this could possibly be helpful. That is all it says. The rest of it is about green tax shifting, but it gets the notion out there.

When we are shifting off bads and onto goods, what are goods. Labor is good; we want people to have jobs so we shouldn't tax jobs. We want businesses to be successful. Why would we punish businesses by taxing them? Why would we punish people for having jobs? We want people to have basic goods and services, so why would we tax consumption?

So we take taxes off there, and where are we going to put those taxes? Onto pollution, resource rental, and site rentals.

Have you ever heard of Arthur Pigou? Most people haven't. He was for a tax levy to correct the negative externalities of a market activity. That is the core of Green tax shifting.

Ecological fiscal reform (EFR). There is a think tank in Calgary, Alberta, Canada called the Pembina Institute, and I think they coined this term. They do talk a little about site rental but not a great deal. They talk mostly about pollution and resources.

Economic rent is the unearned increment of production. That is new terminology for the vast majority. What is an unearned increment?

Community generated. What does that mean? It is a fee for the use and abuse of the global commons. These are lofty topics, but this is what we have to get into as Georgists and as Greens. It belongs to all of us. The semantics is critical here.

The carbon tax and emissions tax and cap and trade and reduce. Let's go to a revenue stream from polluting companies. Better, in my opinion, is the carbon tax, which is point of entry from any company that paid for the privilege of using the commons. Carbon equity is rationing and some people talk about that, but that is also a command and control approach, which I don't recommend.

The Global Commons. What we should do is untax productive labor and innovation, and uptax the use and abuse of the commons. What do we want to untax? We want to untax workers. That is reducing the cost of labor which helps production and makes people cheaper to employ. So you have more value added production, more labor intensive production, and that is where the money is. During our provincial election last year I used a slogal I hear from the British Greens: "Pay for what you burn, not for what you earn", and every time I said it the crowd goes wild because it tells people they can choose if they want to pay taxes or not. It sends the message that my next door neighbor with his SUV will have to pay extra.

Uptax resources, encourage efficiencies. We have no moral or ethical right to burn up or blow off in one generation resources which belong to future generations and other species. There is a guy who is an ecologist in Canada, David Suzuki, who calls what we are doing now a one-generation blow-out sale of resources. One generation and it all will be gone. So we need to reduce resource use.

Reduce pollution and conservation. Other people tell me don't say conservation, but say efficiency.

Untax businesses. When you untax business, you encourage innovation. You reduce the black market. You avoid capital flight. You foster business pride.

When you tax site rentals, you take speculation off the land and reduce sprawl. You shift the tax off buildings so you don't punish someone for fixing up their neighborhood. When you finance infrastructure, all warranted infrastructure should be paid for by the upkick in the land values it produces, and it produces walkability so we don't need the automobile. You optimize land use.

When you do site rental collection, and resource rent collection, you improve farming. You reward ecological services. When a farmer takes ten acres out of production for a stream buffer or wildlife buffer or water conservation, he should be compensated. We don't ask teachers and doctors and lawyers to give up their salary to contribute to the global commons. We have a program that is being used to a small extent in Canada; it is called Alternative Land Use System. We are paying farmers to provide ecological services. It is brilliant because we are compensating people for contributing back to the global commons.

Land Value Taxation encourages Labor intensive value added in farming. Now one farmer who needs 1,000 acres is still poor. On 1,000 acres you should have a couple of thousand people farming. We have the farmer producing undifferentiated global productsthat can be produced far cheaper elsewhere. Within the sight of our cities we are not producing anything that anyone eats in the city. It encourages local production. There is a huge new movement across the continent on local food, and organic production.

Forestry the same thing. Most of Canada is, or was, forest, but we should be paying northern communities, average and otherwise, to keep the forest healthy. We only pay them now to liquidate the forest. We should be paying them to keep the forest integrity. Community forestry, if you can't pay the individuals, compensate the community for keeping the community forests alive. You know, the global commons or the local commons. Again, we would encourage local labor intensive production rather than shipping out raw logs and unrefined pulp and paper.

Manufacturing the same thing. In Georgist economics, tax shifting encourages local production, local jobs, sustainable production, because people want to know where the raw materials come from. If production is local they will know where the raw material comes from. You know, this human contact with the people that are producing the stuff. This is niche marketing rather than undifferentiated production, unlike Ikea that is the McDonalds of the furniture market who produce furniture that ends up in the landfill in 10 years. Reduce bubble economics. You are collecting the rent so there is no incentive to liquidate a resource very quickly.

Transportation is the same thing. Finance infrastructure like I mentioned. It produces a walkable neighborhood linked by transit. You get optimal population density. Land value taxation doesn't create huge high rises because as soon as life gets too crowded, land values go down, and people move. So it optimizes; it is a wonderful self-regulating system if structured properly. Conserve land for nature. Land value taxation encourages optimization of land and leaves a lot more land for nature. These days it is called smart growth.

Fred Harrison wrote a book called Wheels of Fortune. It is available on line for free. The Jubilee line is a subway line that goes to Canary Wharf owned by the Reichmans, Canadian multi-billionaires that went belly-up because of this partially. The Reichmans wanted to build the subway to Canary Wharf, but the city of London wouldn't let them because it was against policy. If it had let them, they would have gained 3 billion pounds to build this subway, and then they would have reaped the $13 billion pounds upkick of the land. But they wouldn't let them, so it took years and years for Canary Wharf. The Reichmans went broke. They finally did build it and they charged everyone around the land 3 billion pounds to build the Jubilee line, and the people who owned the land around Canary Wharf gained 13 billion pounds. The city should have captured the upkick in land values.

Social Services. Collect the economic rent. Jeff Smith talks about providing everyone with a Citizens Dividends to address poverty. That should be funded out of economic rent which accrues to land. We should levy market patents, air waves, etc. and not income taxes.

A Citizens Dividend gives every human their equal share of the commons, which is our birth right. If you don't own land, that is one thing, but you should receive your share of the benefits of land ownership of the earth. We have a human right to clean air, water, and soil.

That is modern economics. Modern is a smart term for Georgist economics. The question is why does our economic system not provide mutually for each other? Why does it not serve the needs of the planet presently? Why does it not respect future generations? Why is there global poverty? Why are we literally causing diversity of species to be lost? If governments used Georgist, or Green economics, it would allow for mutual provision and serve the need of the planet.

JOHN IKERD

I didn?t come here claiming to be an expert in Georgist philosophy or Georgist taxes. Greg Young gave me some reading material and various other things I looked up on the Internet, so I at least would be literate about Georgist philosophy when I came here today. So if I misinterpret something, I hope you will understand that is not the perspective I am coming from. As I understand my role in being invited here today is basically to give an outside perspective from someone who is interested in this because in my books on Sustainable Capitalism* I make reference to Henry George. I think he has some great ideas that economists in general appreciate. I hope that I might stimulate some discussion and different thinking by bringing in some perspectives from the outside as opposed to people who have been involved in the Georgist organization over a long period of time.

I want to start about talking about at least on the surface my interpretation of what the Georgist philosophy is about in general terms. As I read it, in Henry George's 1879 book, the basic idea was to abolish all taxation except that on land. I think the basic argument was that the social inequity was not a result of lack of productivity or the capability of productivity on the part of the people on the land, but was a consequence of misallocation of returns to the resources of land, labor, and capital. Specifically he suggested that the productivity of the natural productivity of land, that not associated with the improvement of the land, the capital, and the labor was basically a public good that should accrue to the benefit of all people and if we taxed that away and we used that appropriately, then we could basically address the issues of poverty and social justice in the same sense that we were dealing with the land.

As I interpret the modern interpretation of where we are today, we are saying that land value taxation, which is the current term, in and of itself of simply taxing the land rent is in fact a green tax, because it will cause the land to be used more intensively to various degrees and then we have added to that the green taxes, where we are talking about tax shifts of taxing the bad and using that to reward the good. I think these expressed as green taxes go beyond the basic Georgist philosophy to begin with, where we are talking about taxing pollution and depletion of resources and then making the tax shift so we don't tax income, or sales, or profits or corporate taxes or any of the other taxes. If I have interpreted up to this point, and the arguments in favor of this, then the important part of the argument analysis that has been made is that the taxes on labor and on capital and profits are basically a dead weight loss to society. If those taxes aren't doing anything useful anyway and therefore if you remove them, you have not lost anything by taking those away from society, because they reduce the incentive to use labor and capital to increase economic productivity, and economic output, economic growth, and to constrain economic activity in growth.

I also would say what I see in the George philosophy is it basically denies the legitimacy of government. It comes back to the point that government really doesn't serve much of any useful function, and therefore the taxes that support government really don't have much value. It is a deadweight loss. I contend, for example, that government is not some historical abrogation. It is not something that somebody just dreamed up for any particular selfish reason, but all civilized societies throughout history have formed some form of government, at the community level, state level, or federal level, or whatever it was and they formed it for a very specific purpose. People historically have discovered that there are certain things that we simply cannot do individually, that we have to work together. There are situations in which we should work for the common good and there are situations in which it is absolutely necessary that we have a formal organization of government, particularly when there are large numbers of people involved. The benefits of that are not just to the whole but to the individual as well because you can use your individual resources more productively, more efficiently, within the context of a civil society, and one of the fundamental functions of government is to insure the civility or the context within which the private economy functions.

In addition to that, there are greater social goods. There is a sense in which we have value within the relationships among people. Those relationships among people are not inherent in the individuals themselves, but are inherent within the whole. Within the common, the relationship is fundamentally different than the individuals that relate. There is also a need for people to come together to determine and reach some form of consensus on what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior and then some means of encouraging the appropriate and discouraging the inappropriate. These are legitimate functions of government. If you go back in the history of this country, for example, revolutionary writer Thomas Paine, who was not a proponent of big government or much government at all, argued that government was a necessary evil, but it was nonetheless necessary. He said historically humanity has proven to have an inability of moral virtue to govern themselves. While most people with the honor society might be inclined toward civility, there are always some who are not. We need a common means of addressing the incivility or the crime of injustice.

Paine argues that basically governments are necessary even though we all wish we could get by without them but we simply are not moral enough to do so. If you look at the United States, and every country has this - it has a charter, it has a constitution -- where it spells out the function of government. It says in the preamble to the United States constitution, "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution." It says this is the purpose of this government, and we name those purposes explicitly.

And in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, they talk about the basic function of governments in general. They talk about all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And in the next line which very few people quote, it says, ?to insure these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.? I say every country has a document somewhere that says this is the legitimate purpose of government within this society. And in general the purposes are to serve the commonwealth, that which we have a right to share in common rather than individual pieces of it.

There are three kinds of functions, and again I deal with this in my book on Sustainable Capitalism, basically to protect the common good, to provide for common goods and services, and to preserve the good of the commons. The most fundamental purpose of government is to protect the common good. And the recognition in forming government is that the whole of a society or that which is governed is something more than simply a collection of individuals. Those relationships matter. It is a foundation of principle. It is a fundamental belief.

Protecting the common good is the most fundamental purpose of government. That is insuring those rights, those things to which we all have an equal right, regardless of our ability, regardless of our education, regardless of our ability to contribute to society -- such things as justice, common defense, life and liberty, the most fundamental of rights. We derive from those fundamental rights such things as public basic education and some level of some means of social security and some minimum level of health care and some food so that people don't starve in the streets, and even the progressive taxation and using the government for economic development all go back to some kind of fundamental right as its foundation. I think we need to recognize that if there is any sense in which we have equal rights that will not be provided by the market place, it will not be provided by the economy because we are inherently unequal in our ability to contribute things of economic value to the society. We have unequal abilities, unequal aptitudes, many of them through no fault of our own, through fault of birth and circumstances, physical abilities, things of that nature. The market place will reward us in our ability to produce something that has economic value if there is any sense in which we have some sort of inherent equal value it has to be insured by us working collectively through government for the commons.

Providing public goods and services. When you talk about things that we have a right to like a basic education, or common defense, those things to be provided by government, I would argue that they have to be provided by government, at least insured by the government, if they are to be equally available to all. When we start privatizing things to which we have equal rights, we have distorted the whole concept. They will not be delivered equally in the market place because they will always find a place where they will serve those they can serve at the lowest cost the most and those that cost the most will not be served, regardless of what we try to do. We have a responsibility through government to insure equity of distribution. It can be contracted and placed through the private sectors.

I would argue that those things I have described up to now are the cost of civilization. That is what you have to pay to live in a civilized society. They are not a deadweight drag on society, they are absolutely essential for the social and societal good.

Now there are other things that we choose to tax ourselves for that are not essential simply because it is more effective and efficient to do so. I would put things in that category like the super highways that surround this place and the airport that is up the road and offensive weapon systems and public higher education and utilities. There is nothing in our constitution that says that we have an inherent right to those things but they are good for us, and it makes more sense to buy them or provide them collectively through us working together through government than it does for us individually to try to go out and build our own little piece of road or piece of an airport or anything of this nature. It is simply impractical or inefficient to do that efficiently and I would argue that those things are not a deadweight loss. They are logical choices about how we choose to divide the money we have against things that we will buy collectively through government and those things that we will buy individually on our own. I would argue both of those are important.

Then we get down to the third one about preserving the good of the commons, the good of the earth so to speak, and that is protecting the health and the productivity of nature in a society. In our constitution it says some of those things we protect for all posterity. In a session this morning they talked about the Tragedy of the Commons. Typically economists bring that up and say, you can't have this commons out here, if you have a commons then people are going to use it for their own individual self-interest and they will simply use it up and destroy it. In my judgement that doesn't prove anything except that where there is something that is for the common good it has to be managed by the people of the commons for the good of the commons rather than for individual self-interest. We need to decide what is in the commons, what belongs there and accept the responsibility of managing the commons for the common good collectively. The individual can't stay there. I think that is the nature of the productivity, that is the nature of the philosophy that we talked about. I would argue that the commons, the things to which we all have a right to share in and, if they are common, we have a right to share in that equally. I think we all have a right to the bounty of nature and I think that is what George was talking about when he wrote the books. He says the nobody created the bounty of nature, it was there, it is the commons and we all have an equal right to that whether we tax it or whether we charge a fee or whatever. All of society has a right to benefit from that, and I agree with that 100%.

It is only recently that modern society has began to recognize the rights of future generations, which I think is an important right. During the 18th and 19th century, during George's time, I think the basic assumption was that the bounty of nature was limitless. It wasn?t just infinite in terms of what was there, it was naturally renewable and nature was always capable of healing itself; basically that the resources of nature were limitless and we could continue to take and take for as long as we wanted to and we would not diminish the total productivity of the commons. I think that is what the Georgist philosophy was based on.

But even early on when George started talking about private property rights, there was this underlying assumption within; it is called the Lockian proviso. It said you can take land out of the commons -- initially all land was in the commons -- but the Lockian proviso said you could only take land out of the commons providing there was enough and as good left in the commons for anyone who might choose to take it. It says you can only take from the commons if you are not depriving anyone in the future of their right to take from the commons. I think in George's day, and particularly in John Locke's day, that was a reasonable assumption because they couldn?t envision that we were ever going to use it up.

So we have the single Georgist tax then, and I think George assumed that the land was a limitless resource of wealth and that if we taxed the land we could support the government without diminishing the productivity, without diminishing the opportunities for anyone of any future time.

Also an important point of that was that the Georgist tax would remove the market incentive for the exploitation of the land that might diminish its productivity, and I think it certainly makes sense. But today our understanding of the world is quite different, today we realize the resources of the earth are not limitless, they are finite. And we realize that the most economically valuable resources of nature are being rapidly depleted, with fossil energy probably leading the list but also many other minerals and precious metals and things of that nature. We know today things that we didn't know in George's day and John Locke's day, that we are rapidly depleting the commons.

We know also that no matter how efficiently we use nature and efficiently we use society we are aware of the concept of the laws of thermodynamics which say that every time we use anything to do anything useful some of the usefulness is lost to entropy. So no matter what we might choose to pursue in terms of an economic strategy or anything else we can't escape that inevitable conflict or the inevitable principle of entropy unless we want to try to repeal the second law of thermodynamics. We are slowly using up everything that was here. And as we mentioned, we understand now in the process of using everything we don't only create usefulness but we also create waste. And we understand today, unlike a century ago, that the earth does not have a limitless capacity to assimilate the waste that we put in it. So we have to deal with it. And from a social side, we realize that we are living in a crowded world today, and that our use of our property almost inevitably today diminishes the usefulness and the value of someone else's property, because it is very difficult for us to constrain our benefits, our costs within the bounds of our personal property.

And there is another one we are coming to realize, and I think it is equally important, that in our pursuit of our individual self-interest, our initiative, our aggressiveness, our competitiveness, our striving to get ahead and accumulate wealth, we weaken the very social fabric of society upon which the productivity of society and humanity ultimately depends. We are destroying the social commons as well as the physical commons in our pursuit of economic growth and individual self-interest.

The Georgist tax, the Green taxes where we talk about specific taxes, I think recognizes that the pursuit of economic development inherently degrades nature and degrades society and therefore it defines bads and goods in terms of those things that degrade nature and degrade society and support society and support nature. I think the Georgist tax, the Green taxes, provides a logical means of internalizing those externalities that spill off on someone else and compensating society in those cases where we damage the environment or damage society and also provide incentives for us to do more of the good things and less of the bad things, and I think in that sense they are very constructive and important, and we need to move in that direction. I think the Georgist land tax in and of itself is more tenuous with respect to how green that is. I think higher taxes may or may not, for example, lead to more intensive land use. If you try to set the taxes too high you end up with the land abandoned rather than used more intensively. So it is very important that you strike the right tax if you want to bring about a solution to that. I think most Georgists recognize that it is not in all cases that more intensive land use would be good for the sustainability or the economic viability for society as a whole. There are cases where we need to use the land less intensively and more extensively and we need to rely on something else for that.

To the extent that we are talking about using that as a tax shift and not taxing capital and labor, I think the Georgist land tax is still more tenuous in that it creates the impression (which I think is in conflict with the basic laws of thermodynamics and laws of entropy) that somehow promoting economic development is inherently good. It may or may not be, depending on the costs that go with that. If you simply use a Green tax to replace other taxes, it means then that the tax is not available to provide for the incentives to internalize externalities or to compensate people for damages that are done or to provide incentives. So if you use it to create disincentives that is one thing. If you use it to simply offset other taxes, that is another. Probably the most important danger of that is if we simply use it to offset other taxes it creates the misperception that those other taxes are basically deadweight losses on society.

There are important reasons for us to work together and to pay the costs that are associated with working together to maintain the civility of our society and to pursue those things that are truly in the common good.