Re: Clutter must go
> can't we incentivize private companies to do this?
There is only one incentive for a commercial company: profit.
Now, unlike sea salvage, where you (cheaply) "save" whole, well-insured vessels full of valuable cargo, there is little to no profit in (expensively) "saving" bolt-sized bits of flying junk.
As for the tax issue, as "Yet Another Anonymous coward" already stated, it wouldn't really work. Nobody likes paying for somebody else's errors, and there would be a lot of finger pointing and blame avoiding maneuvers. Millions would go to lawyers, nothing to actual space cleaning.
Some extremely rich person or entity would have to willingly decide to finance this entirely from their own pockets, with no hope of any return or profit, which obviously is unlikely to happen. Not only are those entities extremely rare, but also it's more likely they single-handedly decide to make the problem worse...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
