How about we tax carbon and everyone makes their own decisions about how to deal with that?
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Hereâs the question you ask the trades people, retail workers and hospitality workers:
Would you rather:
- spend billions of dollars and see years of road construction to add more lanes to handle more traffic (which will lead to more traffic congestion),
- spend billions of dollars to expand mass transit to remove a couple thousand cars off the road,
- spend much less tax dollars in order to provide companies with WFH incentives to create a 20-40% reduction in the number of office workers on road.
It seems to be the most cost effective way to make a significant reduction in traffic, pollution, gasoline consumption, electricity consumption (electric car batteries). Iâm open to better suggestions and modifications to the proposal.
Iâm sure a proposal to tax carbon will go over well with the ubiquitous âwhite vanâ drivers (trades people) everywhere.
The counter-intuitive example goes like this..
Suppose: 4,000 people want to get from START to END.
Due to weird road planning, they canât just take the highway all the way there.
They have to go either through point A or B. And either way they go, they only get to be on the highway for half the time. The rest of the time theyâre on city roads.
The city roads take 45 minutes.
The highway, takes (number of people/100) minutes.
So, being rational, they split. 2000 go through A, 2000 go through B.
The journey takes (45 minutes + 2000/100 = 65 minutes.)
Now⌠someone says, âthis is stupid, the highway is way faster, we need to connect A-to-B.â
Okay, they do that.
The new highway route takes (2000/100+2000/100 = 40 minutes), at first.
But then of course, everybody wants take the highwayâŚ
So it becomes more and more congested.. And pretty soon the journey takes
(4000/100+4000/100 = 80 minutes).
The counter-intuitive part? The connection added 15 minutes to everybodyâs drive. The only way to get back is to destroy the connection.
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That isnât to say that highways are bad. It just means roads complicated. More like an electrical-engineering problem than a city-council problem.
The articles above reference a research paper. The paper argues, in general, that more highways and public transit are mostly useless to fighting congestion. They use averaged data to support their argument, but the data doesnât look that convincing.
Sadly the only people arguing with them are libertarian think-tanks. 
Their clearest argument is simply that travel times and congestions do vary a lot between cities/times so itâs not completely futile anyway.
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I kind of agree with Ranger that you might be able to do a WFH credit and trades people wouldnât realize that youâre effing them over, which is really the key to good governance.
From a practical standpoint, it makes more sense to just tax carbon (raising gasoline prices) and then give poor people a big bag of cash. But I donât know if that would ever be as popular.
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I donât think the proposal is screwing the trades people. Just about anytime the government spends tax dollars, there are direct winners. In my proposal there are direct winners (businesses receiving WFH tax credit) and indirect winners (trades people dealing with less traffic congestion).
The alternatives (road construction, mass transit) seem more expensive and less effective.
Sure, thatâs fair. I agree with you it would be much better if there were fewer people on the road.
I meant, compared to carbon taxes (or other fees for using a car, or being on the road).
Typically makes a lot more sense to charge money for causing a problem than to give a bonus for not causing a problem.
But everybody loves carrots more.
Tax creditsâŚthere is no free lunch.
Either taxes go UP elsewhere, we reduce some government program by the same amount, or we put it on the charge card. Which one did you have in mind?
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Well, -Iâm- already wfh, so, either way itâs free money for me amirite? 
Well in your plan the âwinnersâ are corporations that can shift costs to their employees while reaping a tax windfall from the government. So bigger dividends and larger CEO bonuses. Sounds like the Republican dream scenario.
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And your alternative is to spend billions more and have less impact. That sounds like a typical democrat proposal.
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Giving billions to billionaires is better?
Always. I mean they really know what to do with the money. Unlike those peons who waste it on things like food and rent.
You two guys are right, I see clearly now. Itâs better to waste billions on an inefficient attempt at a solution rather than giving tax credits to businesses for a more effective result.
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Youâre going to have to show your work on the more effective result because if your going by the last 40 years of piss down economics Iâm not buying it.
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With companies organically moving to WFH offerings anyway, why spend billions to pay companies for what they are already doing? Seems like a fiscally poor choice. Iâd rather spend it in other things or actually keep some of our tax revenue to fund what we are already spending
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We need to replace a lot of infrastructure too, not just expand certain areas.
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Yours is the one that costs tax credits plus. Plus what he asks?
When those office workers WFH, a whole lot of folks that made a living off them - barbers to lunch spots to lord only knows how many others - cease to be consumers becauseâŚIâll let you work out the missing part.
The one thing all businesses need is customers. Itâs not complicated.