Sunday, January 27, 2013

Jan 27, 2013: WA carbon tax legislation: 1st draft

Here's the bill draft in both PDF and Word. And here's the Letter of Recommendation with comments and suggested edits from the Code Revisers Office.

A brief overview of the bill: It imposes a carbon tax of $30/ton CO2 on fossil fuels (including the carbon content of imported electricity) and puts half the funds towards tax rebates and reductions and half the funds towards public investments in transportation. The transportation investments are allocated 50% to maintenance, 25% to transit, and 25% to freight mobility projects. The tax rebates and reductions are allocated to the Working Families Rebate (similar to the Earned Income Tax Credit bump-up in many other states that benefits low-income working families), a B&O business tax reduction for manufacturers, extension of the high-tech R&D tax credits, and an across-the-board property tax rebate.

Feedback welcome, and please note that this is a very early draft... lots of work to be done! I'm excited about the prospects of putting together a coalition of business/labor/enviros/social justice to push something like this forward, so please contribute your ideas as we work on a 2nd draft! (By the way we can't formally file something for the Nov 2014 ballot until March at the earliest, so we have at least the next month to work on drafts.)

Update 2pm: A lot of good background info is at www.CarbonWA.org, especially this two-pager. And of course if you want to pledge to collect 1000 signatures (about 40 person-hours of work) please let me know!

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