Shift the weight of taxes from people's work to the resources we dig up and the waste we throw away
In short
- Governments lower the taxes and insurance fees on money people earn from work, a little at a time over many years.
- In their place, they tax metals, oil, sand, and timber taken from the earth.
- They also put a clear tax on the amount of waste that is buried or burned.
- The money collected goes to easing the burden on working people, and the country's total tax bill does not grow.
- Families with low incomes get cash back to cover the higher prices.
If this comes true
A shoemaker on a shopping street pays less to hire people and takes on a young apprentice. On the same street, price tags on new shoes and appliances go up, and more families put off buying replacements.
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The proposal in detail
This proposal changes what is taxed without increasing the total amount of tax. The taxes that get lighter are income tax on wages and the social insurance fees paid by workers and by the people who employ them. The taxes that get heavier fall on new resources taken for the first time from mines, oil fields, quarries, and forests, such as metals, fossil fuels, sand, gravel, and timber, and on waste sent to landfills or incinerators. The resource tax is charged when the resource is dug up or when it is imported into the country. For imported goods, a tax is charged at the border based on an estimate of the amount of resources in the product, so that goods made in countries with no resource tax do not gain an advantage. Resources that are collected and used again are taxed less or not at all. The change is made little by little over ten to fifteen years, with the schedule of tax rates announced at the start so that companies and households can prepare. A law requires that each year the burden on working people be cut by exactly the amount of extra revenue raised from resources and waste, and the tax cuts go first to low-wage workers and small businesses. Part of the revenue is returned to everyone as the same amount of cash per person, to soften the rise in the price of necessities. A law guarantees the level of social insurance benefits even though the source of the money changes. Regions that depend on mining or forestry get priority for funds that help people move into new work during the transition period.
BenefitsFixing, reusing, and hiring people start to pay off
When prices change, society's choices shift as a whole, without writing detailed rules for each product. When new resources cost more and hiring people costs less, jobs like repairing a broken appliance, cleaning up and reselling used goods, and collecting parts to remake them become more worthwhile than making and selling new products. These jobs use a lot of human hands and are often done locally, so work is more likely to appear even in towns and villages with no big factories. For workers, take-home pay rises even if the paycheck stays the same. Because the burden is lightened first for low-wage workers, it helps most the lives of young people and people in irregular jobs. For companies, finding ways to use fewer resources becomes itself a way to make a profit, and caring for the environment becomes a business decision rather than charity. The tax system can push growth of a kind where the numbers that measure the size of the economy rise while the amount of resources used falls.
DrawbacksHigher resource prices hit poor families and mining towns hard
Taxing metals, fuel, and timber raises the prices of the basics of daily life: food, heating, transportation, and housing. Families with low incomes spend a larger share of their money on necessities, so they feel the burden more heavily. Even with a system to return cash, there will always be families whose payback does not keep up with the price rise, and people who slip through the application process. Elderly people who do not work and people who are ill get almost no benefit from the cut in taxes on pay, and only take on the higher prices. In regions that rely on mines, oil fields, or forestry, jobs and the town's tax revenue fall at the same time, and transition funds may not be able to fill the gap. Also, the more successful this tax is, the less resources are used, and the tax revenue itself shrinks, so another source of money will eventually have to be found. Adjustments at the border are hard to calculate, may bring pushback from trading partners, and could end up with rich countries pushing the burden onto poorer resource-exporting countries.
Learn the background
Most of the income of governments, national and local, comes from money people earn by working. Income tax and social insurance fees are taken from pay, and the employer also pays a fee each time they add a worker. Meanwhile, digging metals and oil out of the ground, and throwing away things that still work, are barely taxed, and are sometimes even made cheaper by subsidies. Under this setup, a company gains more by cutting workers than by saving resources, and a household finds it cheaper to buy something new than to fix what is broken. Work that uses a lot of human hands, such as repair, upkeep, caregiving, and small neighborhood shops, looks expensive and becomes hard to keep going. The ones who suffer are not only workers who lose their jobs. People in regions where mining pollutes water and land, and future generations who inherit shrinking resources and growing piles of waste, are also paying the price of today's tax system. Even if we pile up separate rules, such as a right to repair or bans on throwing things away, the flow is hard to change as long as the price system points the other way.
Choose them ready to accept their drawbacks too (up to 5)
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This proposal was written in Japanese by AI (claude-opus-5-5, policy version 2026-10-20a) and translated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5). Nobody has checked the facts. Read the original (日本語) How the AI writes