This is a draft. The energy intensity of each
category is estimated, not measured, and refining those estimates is ongoing work — treat the
ordering as meaningful and any single figure as provisional. Put in what you spend today. The model runs it forward along the same
trajectory the funding sandbox runs — the levy rising on a published schedule, labor taxes
coming off, the dividend arriving — and shows where you actually land, month by month.
How these numbers were built ›
· The national model ›
Read this before you read a number. Prices here rise gross, and the
labor taxes you stop paying are shown as a separate line. That is deliberate: the headline
"about 26% price rise" in the paper is already
net of those taxes, so applying it and also crediting the relief would count
the same money twice. ⚠ Every energy-intensity index below is reasoned, not measured —
they are editable for exactly that reason. Replacing them with a real input-output pull is the
top open item on this model.
How to read this
Describe your household on the left. How many people, what you earn, how
much energy you use, and what you pay for it. Your bills are calculated from those —
the page never asks you for the same fact twice.
Drag the year. Year 0 is today. The levy climbs on a published schedule,
the taxes on your wages come off, and the dividend starts arriving.
Read the net line. Green is ahead, orange is behind. The figure is dollars per
month against staying exactly as you are today.
The orange numbers are editable. Each is how energy-heavy a dollar of that
category is, where 1.00 is the average dollar. They are our estimates. This
is the part of the model we are least sure of, and the page recomputes when you change one.
If the answer is bad, try the electric miles box. High-mileage households
are the ones this design is hardest on. That box is the exit, and the reason is in the note
beside it.
The household
⚠ Tick this for a retiree. It does two things that change the answer
completely: there is no payroll tax to give back, and the income itself rises with the
price level. Inflating a retiree's prices while freezing her check is the frozen-baseline
error, and it invents a loser.
Income tax only — the number off your federal return,
divided by twelve. Leave it at 0 and the page estimates it from the federal brackets and the standard deduction — jointly if you entered two adults. Social Security and
Medicare are worked out for you from your income, since payroll tax is arithmetic:
12.4% up to the taxable maximum of \$184,500 and 2.9% above it with no cap, counting
both your half and your employer's. State income tax, property tax and sales tax
stay out — this design retires federal taxes on wages and touches nothing else, so
including them would hand you back money nobody is giving you.
⚠ This page treats your income as wages. That is the case
the design has most to say about, and it is also its limit: a household paid in capital
gains rather than a paycheck has almost no labor tax to retire, so it receives almost none
of the relief modelled here — and it still pays the levy on everything it buys. The
calculator cannot show you that household. Reading a high-wage result as though it applied
to wealth generally would get the incidence backwards.
Saving is not spending, and the difference matters here.
The levy is charged on what you consume. A dollar you save is capital, and it reaches prices
later or never — which is the same reason households carry about 77% of the levy rather than
all of it. Set this to 0 and the page assumes you spend every cent.
Direct energy — how much you use
Electricity is taxed on primary energy, so a delivered kWh carries the
grid's heat rate — 1.77× today, decaying toward
1.23× as generation leaves combustion
(validation §9). The model decays it across the ramp. That decay is the whole
case for the electric car: a gallon of gasoline is
35.3 kWh of primary
energy forever, while the electricity you buy gets cleaner underneath you.
What you pay for it today
Put in your prices — local energy prices vary more between households
than almost anything else on this page, and they decide what the levy looks like as a
percentage. The dollars it adds do not move: the levy is charged per unit of
energy, so paying more per gallon means the same added dollars are a smaller share of a
bigger bill.
Necessities — \$/mo, and its intensity ◦
Discretionary — \$/mo, and its intensity ◦
The orange figure is the energy intensity of that dollar, where
1.00 is the average dollar of consumption. 0.45 means the price rises
less than half as fast as the average; 3.00 means three times. Edit them — they are
estimates, and the page recomputes.