Open thread for night owls: Norquist says yes to carbon tax. Koch front speaks. Norquist says no

Grover Norquist caused a lot of jaws to drop Monday when'with much hedging'he backed the possibility of a carbon tax as a swap for lowered income taxes. A carbon tax, that is, a levy on fossil-fuel consumption, is a smart idea as long as provisions are made for low-income households.
Just kidding.

On Tuesday, Norquist shifted into reverse after a Koch Bros. front-group, the American Energy Alliance, had given him a brief public reaming in its newsletter: 'Grover, just butch it up and oppose this lousy idea directly. This word-smithing is giving us all headaches.'

Via his Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist spoke out as AEA had commanded, announcing the organization's official view that there is "no conceivable way" a carbon tax could actually be offset by lowered income taxes because both would grow like "tapeworms."

David Dayen vivisected the whole affair:

So that's that. But let's look at one thing. Norquist's normal M.O. is to oppose any tax anywhere, even if offset by additional tax cuts, on the grounds that the other tax cuts could eventually get raised later. This nihilist viewpoint should have foreclosed on the idea of a carbon tax from the outset. So why did he go along for 24 hours? I've heard compelling speculation that trading an income tax cut with a carbon tax would swap out a relatively stable source of revenue with one the government would prefer to see reduced over time. That would really depend on how much the carbon tax would replace income taxes. The studies that exist looking at this show that you would not be able to reduce income taxes across the board by very much, not even 1%. You could reduce payroll or corporate taxes a bit more, but not a major amount. The working assumption is that a carbon tax would raise $1.25 trillion over ten years. If the carbon tax were somehow dedicated to pay for a particular priority, then you could see the same problem you see with our existing carbon tax, the gas tax. That directly funds highway improvements, and with increased fuel economy it's shrinking over time, causing a major shortfall. These things happen gradually, and it still makes sense to tax things you don't want to proliferate rather than things you do. So that's not the major problem. It's that conservatives hate taxes as much as they hate talk about climate change.

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