I hurt my back again (some people suck edition)

Driving home last night from work I noticed a small furry dog in the road. At least other people slowed down but the dog seemed to have no fear of the cars and was going to be roadkill soon, I feared.

So I pulled over to the side of the road, put on my flashers and after the car behind me stopped I tried to catch it. Even though it seemed friendly (and was wearing an obvious collar and dog coat-thing) it didn't want to get within arm's reach. Instead it ran to a house a couple doors up the street, so I followed.

Rang the bell - that house also had a yappy dog and the woman inside seemed suspicious of the leather-coated bearded stranger on her front porch. I yelled that there seemed to be a dog on her yard that seemed to think it lived there and she came out. She told me the dog belonged to the people in the house across the street. Said people were piling in their car and about to drive away so I hurried over to them while she managed to corral the yapping critter. I stopped them from leaving and she brought the dog over.

On the way back she confided that the dog gets loose all the time and is often in her yard. She's called the police, called animal control multiple times. Nothing seems to be done. And on the walk back to my car I slipped on sidewalk ice and re-wrenched my back. Fooey. Spent much of last night with the heating pad on it and it's mostly OK today. Still, fooey.

I don't get it. How can you leave the house without knowing where your dog is? How can you take the care to get a collar and tag and put a coat on the dog so it stays warm, and not be careful that it's leashed or penned properly? Some people suck.

Let's talk about something different (economics)

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/02/04/the-realistic-and-the-optimal-ways-to-overhaul-energy-taxes/

Felix Salmon is probably my favorite economics writer/blogger at the moment. He does have a weird fascination with the (high) art market but he's generally common sense and quite readable. At least, to me. That might be a side-effect of having spent 8 years working in financial services, but I think he's writing for a general audience. He also tends to stay out of politics which has more or less polluted what Krugman is writing these days. Whether or not I agree with Krugman's politics, I think he's less interesting when he writes political stuff.

In this blog entry, Salmon is making an argument for a carbon tax, as opposed to our present (convoluted) scheme of energy credits and subsidies. Whether or not you think taxing carbon emissions is a good idea, I think replacing a complex government scheme with a simpler one is likely to be for the better. Of course it'll get more complex as more details get added, but starting simple is better than starting complex.

I also take it as an item of faith that anthropogenic warming is happening and that its unchecked effects will be catastrophic within our or our childrens' lifetimes. I believe that useful action requires governmental-level change. The two schemes that are most often floated are a "cap and trade" scheme of credits, or a carbon tax. I strongly favor the latter.

Cap and trade, which is currently being tested in California and parts of Europe, is supposed to be more market-friendly, but I think that's something of a hoax, since it's a case of the government setting up an artificial market, setting controls on it (caps), and choosing who is able to participate in it. For example, both CA and the EU have disallowed environmentalists from buying up carbon credits and then "retiring" them, effectively taking carbon out of the system. When you have that overt a government hand in things, calling it a "free market" is fakery of the first order.

Salmon argues that a carbon tax would be revenue-generating and progressive, both of which are potentially true but he doesn't go as far as I would like, which is to say I want the carbon tax to be revenue-neutral. So long as the tax becomes a revenue source there's an incentive to keep it in place and increase it. If the revenue generated from the tax were disbursed so that once the cost of the program was accounted for the net change in government income was zero then the incentives to grow the tax would be much less. And since it would apply to everyone and every industry the government would not have to be so rigid a gatekeeper as in cap-and-trade.

Yes, I'm a raging socialist and this is purely a redistributive effort that takes money from people who make messes and reimburses people for the costs they incur in dealing with such messes. That and the word "tax" mean this has exactly zero chance of ever being enacted in Washington. But I can dream, in between apologizing to my children for the massively fucked-up state in which we're going to hand them the world.