Carbon tax and cap and trade

Some people seems to believe that there is a significant difference between carbon tax and cap-and-trade when permits are auctioned off.
The idea that

A carbon tax will never be high enough to do the job.

but

1. Carbon cap is gradually lowered 80% by 2050.

is plain silly.
Price of permits will be equal to the tax that would do the same job. So if the carbon tax will never be high enough, price of permits will have to be astronomical.
It might be possible that increasing carbon tax without limit would not work (politically). But reducing number of carbon permits so that their price is very, very high should be easy to pass?

As a side note - the idea that CO2 emissions can be lower by 80% by 2050 are plain silly. There are very likely to be significantly increasing costs of doing so - to stop emissions won't probably be that expensive, but each additional percentage of a decrease will cost significantly more than the previous. Of course, you can easily reduce humans' carbon emission by 80% - just kill enough of them. Somehow, I don't think this is what people have in mind.

Ivy league

The schools in Ivory league (and a few more) are successful school. Not necessarily in the education they provide, but in getting money from their students and graduates. They are actually so successful that some of them have endowment exceeding $1,000,000 per current students.
I never quite understood why they hoard such huge amounts of money (Harvard has about $35 billion) instead of spending them*.
BTW: the endowments and profits of (non-profit) schools are untaxed. It is not really surprising that some people want to take such advantage away from them. And so they should.

* My Fulbright application to spend a year at Harvard was rejected despite the (promised) fee $8,000 to the school, invitation letter and basically minimal burden I would be (no, you do NOT get an office when visiting Harvard. You get a chair in the library). Instead, I went to UCSD, for free and met much friendlier (and better, as far as I can tell NOW) faculty. The reason for me not going to Harvard was a fight between faculty and department of economics about space, reconstruction (and who knows what else) which lead the DoE to reject visiting students as much as possible (exchange programs between Ivory league schools had to keep going, otherwise H. students might have trouble to be visiting elsewhere). There seems to be something rotten in the kingdom of Harvard...

Tax

As you probably know, there is no VAT tax in the US, but there is sales tax. But the prices you see at the selves do not include it, which unfortunately means that you do not know how much you will pay at the counter.Unsurprisingly, there is some research out there showing that including the tax in the price posted on the shelve would decrease your consumption of that good.