Half-Price Housing
I doubt that anyone who's followed British Columbia's real estate trends will find this news surprising: apparently, home ownership in the province isn't as affordable as it used to be. Shocking, I know.
But what does interest me about the article is this bit:
The RBC affordability index measures the proportion of pre-tax household income needed to service the costs of owning a home...Across B.C., a standard two-storey home stood at 68 per cent...and a standard condo at 34 per cent. [Emphasis added.]
Lookit: condos in the province cost about half as much as standard two-storey homes. (I'm all about the Canadian spelling!)
Which makes me wonder: what's all the fuss I hear about condo developments making housing unaffordable?
Climate Pricing Uncertainty Principle
I'm not sure that this Wall Street Journal article gets the "carbon tax" vs. "cap and trade" debate quite right. It portrays the dispute as a split between politicians and economists:
Many academics, even conservatives, favor a tax on carbon emissions. Many lawmakers, including some liberals, fear a political backlash against new fees. They lean toward a cap-and-trade system, which would set a limit on carbon-dioxide emissions and require companies to obtain permits to release carbon dioxide into the air.
Obviously, there's some truth to the economist/politician divide. And to its credit, the article gets one big issue right: to a large extent, "cap and trade" is a tax by another name. Both drive up the cost of emitting carbon, which leads all actors in the economy to cut back on emissions. (Even some proponents of cap-and-trade don't seem to recognize how similar that system is to a tax.)
But to me, the fundamental divide isn't politics vs. economics. It's this:
Do we want a system where the emissions reductions are fairly certain, but the price tag for polluting is unpredictable (i.e., a cap)? Or would we rather have a system in which prices are a given, but the effects are difficult to gauge in advance (i.e., a tax)?
