What is the basis for the claim that income tax in NYS and CA pushed prices and income up? This seems extremely unlikely, unless you are looking at pretax income or something.
This isn't accurate if you are talking about the federal level. A better model in terms of spending is that the federal government is an insurance company with an army.
The federal government spends something like 10 times as much on defense as direct educational expenditures and it's still significantly more than education if you include things like loan financing in education.
Who cares? What matters is if it's working or not. Of course it's hard to untangle if it's due to accords, scientific/engineering breakthroughs, government investment, etc. but India and China are far ahead of their Paris targets: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15052017/china-india-pari...
China has no obligation for 20 years.
This statement is wrong in multiple ways. As you noted above, Paris is non-binding, so there are no "obligations" beyond developing a plan and reporting on progress. Next, China's goals begin in 2030, which is 13 years away, not 20. Finally, according to the link above, China is on pace to meet its goals almost a decade (!) in advance, i.e. early in the 2020s. So even a charitable interpretation of your statement looks to be wrong by about 4x.
It's not ratified by Congress.
This is as far as I can tell, just a negative thrown in that has nothing to do with the thesis. Is agreeing to the accords bad for the U.S. (cost billions!) or does it not matter, because it's not ratified. Which is it?
Nothing from agreeing to this was going to affect your descendants other than draining American coffers of billions.
So basically every other country is willing to drain their coffers. Why is that?
The correct answer is probably to allow car deliveries/parking at certain times of the day (late evening and early morning?) and have the streets be pedestrian/biker only outside of those hours.
I'd guess most are more concerned that if they give you a private office, others will request one and they aren't equipped to give lots of private offices. And if they give just you one, it will cause resentment in the team that isn't worth it.