A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

For anyone curious, if you made a similarly sized gas-powered pickup with an i4 engine, it would be penalized more than a full-sized pickup for being too fuel inefficient, despite likely getting much better mileage than an F-150 because, since 2011, bigger cars are held to a lesser standard by CAFE[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...

Example #5621 that a simple carbon tax would be miles better than the complex morass of regulations we currently have.

That's overly reductive.

1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.

2. You can work around #1 by applying incentives for manufacturers to make more efficient cars should lead any carbon tax

3. If you just reward companies based on fleet-average fuel economy without regard to vehicle size, then it would be rather bad for US car companies (who employ unionized workers) that historically make larger cars than Asian and European companies.

4. So the first thing done was to have a separate standard for passenger vehicles and light-trucks, but this resulted in minivans and SUVs being made in such a way as to get the light-truck rating

5. We then ended up with the size-based calculation we have today, but the formula is (IMO) overly punitive on small vehicles. Given that the formula was forward looking, it was almost certain to be wrong in one direction or the other, but it hasn't been updated.

> 1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.

You give it back to poor as a income-phased out refundable tax credit. Crucially, base it not on how much they drive or consume, but on their income.

Name it something like the "Worker's Energy Credit". In the worst case, it cancels out the carbon tax spent by them commensurate with their lower income.

In the best case poor people who don't drive much actually come out ahead, and it's just a very progressive sales tax.

The rich might hate it, and call it "redistribution", which is fine because that's exactly what it is, and what taxes have always been, but this one would redistribute downwards instead of upwards, and incentivize lower carbon emissions by those who can afford it.

Giving it back based on being alive on Dec 31 seems the best solution to me. (It’s very difficult to game and if you give 900 billionaires under a million bucks in total, it’s just not that big a deal…)

We manage to phase out ACA subsidies at 400% of the federal poverty level, so I don't see why we couldn't use a similar mechanism for an energy tax credit.