https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2024-02-08/column-higher-electric-bills-for-the-wealthy-sounds-great-boiling-point
California is looking to raise electric bills for the wealthy — and maybe middle-class families too.
Archived copies of the article: archive.today web.archive.org ghostarchive.org
in the form of flat fees on their monthly electric bills
Base fees are regressive and financially disincentivize progress.
If you want people to use less electricity, remove base fees and increase usage fees.
Another way of looking at it: imagine you had to pay a big fee to enter the grocery store, but once inside, everything was similarly priced. A potato would cost almost the same as a ribeye steak. You'd see lots of people walking out with steak, and as a result we'd have a major increase in agriculutural climate emissions.
Electricity is the same way. When everyone's paying base fees to artificially lower usage rates, poor people are subsidizing the extravagant usage of the rich.
Remove regressive base fees and charge people for the damage they do.
The article says:
The Golden State’s poorest residents — those already enrolled in discounted rate programs — would pay small fixed charges.
and
Millionaires and billionaires would be slapped with the same fixed charges as middle-class families struggling to get by
Maybe I'm misreading, or maybe the article is poorly written, but it sounds like everyone would be paying fixed fees.
Setting a fee based on income sounds super error prone and vulnerable to gaming in the same way that the rich can avoid taxation. Imagine a CEO making $1 in salary with the rest in stocks, how would that be charged? Or imagine $1 in salary, but the rest in free housing, food, transportation, etc. What's the overhead for properly monitoring all this? It must be huge to do a credible job. We're already not doing it and repeating the same obvious error can only be assumed to be intentional.
Just remove base fees and charge people for their usage. Poor people already use much less electricity than rich people so they would save money under my proposal, while the people who use more would have to pay more.
I agree that better enforcement of income tax payment by the wealthy is important.
Denying that it can be done is just defeatism
Not saying it can't be done, just that it isn't.
We should work toward proven solutions instead.
The Inflation Reduction Act actually included a lot of money to have the IRS catch wealthy tax cheats. It seems to be working.
Since state taxation is based on federal taxation, this should improve state revenue as well.