It’s That Time of Year Again
In a Kansas City Star article, Steve Everly reminds us that Missouri’s annual green tax holiday is coming up:
Beginning Monday, the state will offer $5.6 million in rebates to Missouri residents who buy energy-efficient clothes washers, dishwashers, furnaces, air conditioners and heat pumps.
That’s not all. The state from April 19 to 25 won’t collect its 4.225-percent sales tax on those products, plus energy-efficient refrigerators and freezers.
Contributors to Show-Me Daily have written extensively about how programs like Missouri’s green tax holiday and last year’s Cash for Clunkers program are ineffective. These are examples of government programs that provide an incentive to consumers (i.e., a rebate) to buy certain items (e.g., an appliance or a car) in an attempt to incite economic activity and change individual behavior (which will ostensibly help preserve the environment). The following is a digest of these arguments. If any Show-Me Daily readers know of additional disadvantages to these programs, please add to this post in the comments.
1. Instead of creating new economic activity, programs that offer rebates on products like appliances and cars only distort the market.
In a previous post, Charis Fischer explained that these transactions would have occurred anyway in the future, independent of a rebate in the present:
Using tax dollars to help people buy more energy-efficient machines is likely an inefficient use of funds, because purchases of these machines will become much more common within the next few years anyway, as older machines start to die. The fact that people can save money on energy costs by upgrading their appliances is already a significant incentive.
2. The intended environmental impact is negated through the construction of the program.
The subsidy incentivizes the destruction of operational appliances and the construction of new appliances to replace them. It could also be possible that having an appliance that is more fuel-efficient would encourage a person to wash more dishes and laundry than he did before. Justin Hauke posted previously that, unless each Missouri resident buys a new appliances that week, the Green Tax Holiday would have no impact on overall energy usage in the state.
3. The money that is spent in rebates could be devoted to other programs.
Caitlin Hartsell explained in an earlier post how programs like Missouri’s Green Tax Holiday and Cash for Clunkers illustrate Bastat’s broken window fallacy.
[W]hen the government uses taxpayer money to stimulate one part of the economy, this comes at the expense of those other economic sectors that will no longer benefit from some measure of either consumer spending or invested savings.
4. This cements the idea that individuals should look to the government for approval of which products and services to buy and how to behave, which should not be the role of government.
Sarah Brodsky pointed out that, by eliminating state sales tax on only those appliances that have the Energy Star designation, the government favors certain products and behaviors over others.
