Great. But there’s still something fundamentally wrong with public money going to support private companies in this way. I fear this sends the message “don’t go green until the government throws you a load of money to incentivise it”. By all means, support the infrastructure (and take the income from it for the public purse), but make the shareholders pay for going green. Or just nationalise if they don’t want to.
If you want to incentivise shareholders to go green, it’d imo actually help more to have tax deductions for investing in those, while you raise dividend tax on non-SRI (socially responsible investing). The extra dividend tax can go towards three:
a) making sure algorithms and media foster general wellbeing, so, corporate can’t lobby as effectively, thus hindering the far right
b) financing public projects and works, independently managed sovereign wealth funds with a strong ESG, SRI focus
c) fostering cooperatives and building financial reserves for crisis years
d) closing tax evasion loopholes, possibilities for capital flight, and properly taxing multimillionnaires and autocratic (i.e. non-cooperative) companies.
In this way, you also prevent shareholders from having an incentive to invest in fossil fuel desinformation and authoritarian movements.
Great. But there’s still something fundamentally wrong with public money going to support private companies in this way. I fear this sends the message “don’t go green until the government throws you a load of money to incentivise it”. By all means, support the infrastructure (and take the income from it for the public purse), but make the shareholders pay for going green. Or just nationalise if they don’t want to.
If you want to incentivise shareholders to go green, it’d imo actually help more to have tax deductions for investing in those, while you raise dividend tax on non-SRI (socially responsible investing). The extra dividend tax can go towards three:
a) making sure algorithms and media foster general wellbeing, so, corporate can’t lobby as effectively, thus hindering the far right
b) financing public projects and works, independently managed sovereign wealth funds with a strong ESG, SRI focus
c) fostering cooperatives and building financial reserves for crisis years
d) closing tax evasion loopholes, possibilities for capital flight, and properly taxing multimillionnaires and autocratic (i.e. non-cooperative) companies.
In this way, you also prevent shareholders from having an incentive to invest in fossil fuel desinformation and authoritarian movements.
Yes that makes a lot of sense. Make it increasingly difficult not to go green, through the tax system, rather than directly paying them to go green.
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