Quote Originally Posted by allrollsin21
"Why don't we impose an environmental tax (which I believe already exists but have to verify) on the companies?"

The reason we do not is because of lobbyists. The people paying for the elected officials campaigns. Any current environmental taxes are nonsense. The externalities associated with these huge corporations are beyond the scope of most peoples understanding. Gas SHOULD cost well over 5$ a gallon. A t-shirt should cost a Hundred... This applies to everything at the cherished walmarts. The cost should be increased and companies should be responsible for cleaning up the mess being made of the environment. If they don't want to do it, which they have shown they do not, then they need HUGE taxes imposed so the government can do it for them. All this freedom, and american dream nonsense...if the government would let them, these companies would be pouring their toxic wastes in a hole underneath your homes.
This is not exactly the same thing, but one of the ideas that is very popular in europe these days is the idea that the producer of an item should include the cost of its disposal in the price and then be reponsible for taking it back when the conusmer is done with it. Many of the real costs of producing something are not captured in the price charged, and disposal is one of them. This is one of the reasons we are sold so much short-lived, highly-disposable, and inexpensive crap --- the cost of the waste is not captured in the price paid.

Returning to your examples, you mentioned a gallon of gas and a tee shirt. The price of a gallon of gas does not include the cost of the pollution associated with producing it, or using it. Those added costs are hard to quantify, but the are real.

The tee-shirt example is easier to understand. The price of a tee shirt made overseas does not capture the costs that would be added to it if it were produced in the US --- mostly costs associated with fair labor practices that are required or expected within the US. With regards to the tee-shirt and the other cheap Walmart crap bargains, Americans seem to want it both ways. We complain about our jobs going overseas, but we would go completely ape-shit crazy if we were asked to pay the price of a tee shirt made here in the US by an adult American making at least minimum wage, working an 8-hour day, with decent health insurance, disability insurance, Workers Comp, and Social Security. The only way we can get $4 tee shirts is by having them made overseas by children who work 12 hours a day for pennies and without any kind of healthcare or other benefits. So the way it works now is that those added costs are not captured in the price --- they are paid by the American who lost his job and by the kid overseaas working in a sweatshop under unfair labor conditions.