A carbon tax that the 1% could live with

I just love Mark Thoma's intro. And the rest of it too:

I expected Greg Mankiw's latest column to be about sales of his textbook. That's important news everyone should know about. But in a complete surprise, he talked about carbon taxes instead:

A Carbon Tax That America Could Live With: ... If the government charged a fee for each emission of carbon, that fee would be built into the prices of products and lifestyles. When making everyday decisions, people would naturally look at the prices they face and, in effect, take into account the global impact of their choices. In economics jargon, a price on carbon would induce people to “internalize the externality.”

A bill introduced this year by Representatives Henry A. Waxman and Earl Blumenauer and Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Brian Schatz does exactly that. Their proposed carbon fee — or carbon tax, if you prefer — is more effective and less invasive than the regulatory approach that the federal government has traditionally pursued.

The four sponsors are all Democrats, which raises the question of whether such legislation could ever make its way through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The crucial point is what is done with the revenue raised by the carbon fee. If it’s used to finance larger government, Republicans would have every reason to balk. But if the Democratic sponsors conceded to using the new revenue to reduce personal and corporate income tax rates, a bipartisan compromise is possible to imagine. ...

Mankiw once said that economists shouldn't consider the political realities of policy, they should just recommend the best policy:

Politics aside: I have finally gotten around to reading the new Ebenstein biography of Milton Friedman. Here is a quotation from Milton that I particularly like:

“The role of the economist in discussions of public policy seems to me to be to prescribe what should be done in light of what can be done, politics aside, and not to predict what is ‘politically feasible’ and then to recommend it.”

So now, when I advocate raising gasoline taxes and cutting income taxes, and my conservative friends tell me that the plan is politically unrealistic, that the government will just keep the extra revenue instead of cutting income taxes, I can quote Milton....

I get that Mankiw really wants his personal taxes to be lowered, he seems to hate the idea of paying a fair share in taxes from what he makes from the textbook he hawks at every opportunity. But why, from an economic standpoint, is lowering his personal taxes (corporate taxes too) the best option (as opposed to simply trying to find something that is politically acceptable to the right)? Has he made that argument? The revenue could be used to help low income households that would be hurt by the tax, for deficit reduction without cutting programs, there are all sorts of ways the revenue could be used and it's not at all clear that his recommendation is, from an economic rather than a political view, the best way to use the revenue from a carbon tax.