{"id":16103,"date":"2012-07-18T08:29:39","date_gmt":"2012-07-18T13:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16103"},"modified":"2012-07-18T08:30:18","modified_gmt":"2012-07-18T13:30:18","slug":"what-is-the-best-way-to-demonstrate-care-for-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/07\/18\/what-is-the-best-way-to-demonstrate-care-for-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"What is the best way to demonstrate care for the future?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to <a href=\"http:\/\/business.time.com\/2012\/07\/16\/care-about-the-future-then-lower-capital-taxes\/\" target=\"_blank\">Steven Landsburg<\/a>, the answer is to cut capital taxes, and he makes a good case:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There are only three things you and I can do to make the future world a better place.  First, we can consume less, leaving more resources behind. Second, we can work harder, planting trees, building factories and writing poems that will live on after we\u2019re gone. Third, we can innovate, advancing science and technology so that our children\u2019s children\u2019s children can make better use of the resources they inherit.<\/p>\n<p>As it happens, there\u2019s one key policy variable that drives all three of these things, and that\u2019s the tax rate on capital income (which includes interest, dividends, corporate income and capital gains). Capital taxes are a disincentive to save, and when people don\u2019t save they consume instead. Capital taxes are a disincentive to work and a disincentive to innovate.<\/p>\n<p>This is not a plea for lowering taxes in general, and it\u2019s not a plea for making the tax system either more or less progressive. (If you want to soak the rich, there are plenty of things to tax besides capital.) As a matter of fact, this isn\u2019t even a plea for lowering taxes on capital. It\u2019s simply an observation that <em>if<\/em> your goal is to leave a better world for our descendants, <em>then<\/em> your best bet is to support lower capital taxes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>H\/T to <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/TimHarford\/statuses\/225500730482638850\" target=\"_blank\">Tim Harford<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to Steven Landsburg, the answer is to cut capital taxes, and he makes a good case: There are only three things you and I can do to make the future world a better place. First, we can consume less, leaving more resources behind. Second, we can work harder, planting trees, building factories and writing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,65,84],"tags":[174,369,513,118],"class_list":["post-16103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","category-government","tag-innovation","tag-interesting","tag-research","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4bJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16103"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16105,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16103\/revisions\/16105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}