The Political Economy of a Carbon Tax: A County-By-County Investigation

The Political Economy of a Carbon Tax: A County-By-County Investigation

This report investigates the impact of a revenue-neutral carbon tax whereby revenues raised from a $25/ton carbon tax are used to reduce the tax rate on wage income by a commensurate amount. Recognizing that such a reform is not revenue-neutral for every single taxpayer, nor even revenue-neutral in every county, we investigate the degree of spatial variation across all counties and sort results by the historical partisan preferences of those counties.