Green Blue Laws

[Geee]

American Thinker:

Montgomery County, Maryland is the latest locality to impose a 5-cent tax on shoppers or restaurant-goers who need a plastic bag to take their purchases home. Next door, Washington, D.C. imposed such a tax already; environmentalists are pushing localities everywhere to do the same.
The tax is insignificant as a revenue-raiser -- perhaps $1 million a year will be collected, and probably less. The tax is in fact designed not to be collected. Relative to the actual price of producing such a bag -- not even 1 penny -- the tax is outrageous, at a 400-percent rate. Few people will pay 5 cents for something they value at zero -- they will go to significant extremes to avoid it, even if it adds "only" 25-50 cents' added costs per trip to the supermarket.

Defenders of the tax say this is exactly the point. They happily gloat that this is a tax which results in a change in behavior that they have long wanted to see. Suffice it to say, it is nice that liberals occasionally acknowledge that taxing something produces less of it.

But that intellectual victory for conservative principles of taxation is probably a one-off. This is not an ordinary public policy discussion.
Let's take the tax's defenders at their word that their real goal is to eliminate the unsightly waste of loose plastic bags floating in streams and in traffic medians. But there are other forms of trash often found in streams and traffic medians. Beverage containers. Fast food cartons. Political yard signs. Shall we tax people at a rate of 400 percent merely to possess these items?

We do tax items to capture their "cost" to society. We tax gasoline. We tax cigarettes. The only way you can justify such a penalizing tax rate on a product is if you can say that whatever utility it serves, its external negative features -- the problems it causes -- are so large that the product itself is profoundly dangerous to life, liberty, and the Republic.

Are plastic bags that awful? Their production, we are told, involves chemicals and plastic compounds that poison our air and water for eons. Sounds bad.

But plastic bags are terrific devices. They are feather-light, yet hold several pounds of goods. They can be reused multiple times. Dog-owners are grateful to have them for some disposable protection when they pick up after their pets. Parents of newborns are thrilled to encase a particularly nasty diaper on the fly.

Compared to these benefits, how awful is the environmental damage plastic bags are alleged to cause? We cause far more environmental damage for far less practical benefit. There are other pollutants of our streams -- pesticides, fertilizers, and old tires, for example -- but we don't impose 400-percent taxes on them.

[RandyM]

A 400-percent tax on a piece of plastic that starts its life holding oranges and ends its life holding dog poop. If this is a victory for public policy, our Republic is in greater danger than I thought.

 

 

Amen.

 

 

I would imagine the pollutants belched from Air Force One and Al Gore's planes are more detrimental to the environment than plastic bags.