Bob Inglis admits he’s a bit of a Republican dinosaur.
"I’m a conservative. I believe in the Constitution and the rule of law. I believe in balancing budgets. I believe that America has a role in the world and that it's important to use diplomacy first. It's important to work through international organizations," he told SPR News.
"I think all of those things are conservative. And so I'm a little bit out of step with the tune playing on Republican radio at the moment. But I believe that really, the current tune is going to be in oldies here pretty soon."
Inglis represented South Carolina for 12 years in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2010, Republican voters told him they didn’t want him anymore. Now he’s the executive director of RepublicEn, a group that promotes free market solutions to climate change.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Bob Inglis: We think it's really all about fixing the economics and so the hard thing that we got to say is let's tax it. And that may sound like, what, that's not conservative. Well, actually, if you go back to, for example, seeing Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue show in the 1980s, Phil asking, what do you do about pollution? You don't want to regulate it, Friedman says, you tax it. This is the father of the Chicago School of Economics, Reagan's economics advisor. And then he goes on to explain how you got to make products bear their cost, all of their cost, to the marketplace so that consumers and the liberty of enlightened self-interest can choose their self-interest.
What we think it starts with is just a carbon tax that's paired with a reduction in payroll taxes. So there's no growth of government, and it deals with the problem of regressivity. If you just have a naked carbon tax, it really hurts poor people. But if you reduce their payroll taxes while you're doing the carbon tax, Congressional Budget Office says the bottom 70% end up better off with that tax swap.
And then, of course, the key is you've got to apply that tax to imports and that's where the action is. It's called a carbon border adjustment mechanism. If we apply the tax to imports coming from a country that doesn't have the same carbon tax, it makes it in their interest to follow our lead and to apply a carbon tax internally to their own country, because otherwise they're forking over money to the United States government when their goods land in our ports that they could have collected themselves. And so it makes it in their interest to do the same thing. And then eight billion people start seeing what Milton Friedman talked about. They start seeing in products the true cost, because now they're built in.
So you go to the grocery store after this happens, carbon tax happens, and you got the paper plates and you got the plastic plates. Well, the paper's up a little bit, chainsaw gas, natural gas at the paper mill, drying the paper, that has to be included in the price of the product. But the plastic plates, wow, they're up in price. It's all petroleum, all natural gas all the time. And then consumers, bigger paycheck in their pocket, get to choose. If you're cheap like me, and I think most people are, they're going to pick up those paper plates. That's going to happen on every shelf in the store. There's going to be some greener, cleaner, renewable thing that's now relatively cheaper than the dirty stuff that's just been made accountable. And that'll make the innovation happen, because we will have seen the price. It'll be built into the price of the products.
DN: The state of Washington has a Climate Commitment Act whereby, one, our gas taxes are higher, but two, we also have carbon credit auctions, and companies will pay that. Certainly Washington pays among the highest gasoline taxes in the nation. Would that continue under what you're talking about?
BI: I would think that Washington state would want to revise that once we got a federal system here. And hats off to Washington state for leading on this. What Washington state can't do is what I've just talked about here, it can't do that carbon border adjustment mechanism. Only the federal government can do that under the U.S. Constitution because it is essentially a tariff. It would not set off a tariff war like we're in the midst of right now. It is a different thing. This is, in fact, a tariff, a carbon tariff. But it's consistent with existing World Trade Organization rules that you can apply a tax based on the content of the stuff coming into your country and this would be a carbon content tax. We think it'd be upheld by the World Trade Organization and consistent with existing precedents.
DN: So where's the obstacle here? Is it a political obstacle whereby some people are going to have to admit that climate change is actually a real situation or does it go deeper than that?
BI: I think it's a problem of trust, really. Trust me, we can put on a carbon tax, but I'm going to cut your taxes somewhere else. Trust me? And unfortunately right now, most people would say, I'm not sure. I'm not sure I trust you.
There's also the challenge that we're dealing with folks that are succeeding at a game at the 10 yard line when most of the game needs to be played within the 40s, you know, in politics. But we have people on social media and in that world that become very influential by playing really somewhere between the 10 yard line and the goal line. You know, I mean, they're out there, both right and left, saying really nutty stuff. But it works for them because they get clicks, they get followers and they can monetize that. And it's, I don't know, tell me how we fix that.
DN: So if you look back at your time as a congressional member, now that you've been away from it for 15 years, do you think differently than you did back then? Would you have taken this position 15 years ago when you were running for reelection for Congress?
BI: Well, that was the problem. I did. I'm the worst commercial for this. It's like, Inglis, look what happened to you, man. You got cut off from the tribe. But I would say that was in the darkest days of the Great Recession. That was 2010. I mean, you know, the fall of ‘08, the wheels were coming off the financial system.
I was at Gonzaga on Tuesday. I asked the students, how old were you in 2008? They're holding up one finger or two fingers or three fingers. And I said, okay, your parents will remember that banks were failing. It was a really difficult time. And so came the ‘10 cycle, and we're still in the Great Recession. And that's when I lost in a Republican primary. After 12 years in Congress, got just 29% of the vote. The other guy got the other 71% of the vote.
The most enduring heresy coming out of that was just saying that climate change is real. Let's do something about it. I had proposed exactly what I'm talking about here, the Raise Wages, Cut Carbon Act of 2009. It's a revenue neutral, border adjustable carbon tax. And so that revenue neutral means, of course, we were going to cut payroll taxes. We're going to put on the carbon tax, and then we were going to apply it to imports. So that's the border adjustable aspect. That and some other heresies got me in a lot of trouble and so I was tossed out.
At that point, a foundation came to me and said, you're an unusual zoo animal, an actual conservative who says climate change is real. We speak and write for the proposition. So that's what I've been doing ever since.
I'm actually encouraged about what I'm hearing here lately. I think we are moving on to the next. People are beginning to realize that the braggadociousness, the hoaxerism stuff, it's getting a little bit old and so they're starting to look around for the next. I felt that last night, for example, at the Young Republican Club of Spokane County. They were open to hearing the message.
