Democrats propose plastic grocery bag tax
By Brian Kirwin | Thursday, January 6th, 2011 | Policy20 cents per bag!
One thing you can count on every January is for Democrats to propose more ways to get money from you.
Del. Joe Morrissey thinks your trip to the grocery store should cost a little more thanks to his proposed increased taxation.
He’s got a problem with plastic bags, and thinks a plastic bag tax is just what Virginia needs. He doesn’t like plastic bags, and last year tried to have them banned.
Hey, Joe….what about trees???
If we all go back to paper bags, we’re just going to encourage cutting down more trees and harming the environment, right? Surely if your goal is a better environment, you’ll want people to stop using paper bags, too.
Someone should offer a “save the trees” amendment to add paper bags to Morrissey’s tax scheme.
Of course, it’s not just groceries getting this new bag tax. It’s every retail store. More taxes, more government-knows-best. More “do what government says or pay up.”
Morrissey’s nutty ideas like this rarely get a vote even in committee, but this is one that should go to the House floor….just for fun.
His colleagues can join us in bagging it.
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The right wants to jeer him. The left wants to censor him. Moderates usually want both. Brian Kirwin is a political consultant and public relations strategist in Virginia Beach with a lightning-rod flair. Brian also serves on the VB Arts & Humanities Commission and frequently appears on Hampton Roads theatrical stages, if only to prove that all actors aren’t liberals. Kirwin’s columns stir up debate and hit the political scene with no punches pulled.
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14 Responses to "Democrats propose plastic grocery bag tax"
As someone who always asks for “plastic” at the grocery store, I have to agree.
The fact that ecological extemist don’t seem to grasp is that the plastic bags are a multi-use item: they’re about the right size to carry you lunch to work in, you can line a litter box or a small trash can with them.
On the other hand, those big plastic paper bags from the grocery store goe right into the trash.
Also, for those of use who don’t have the luxury of a garage and have to carry out groceries from the street to the house..much fewer trips with the plastic bags.
Del. Morrissey is a tree killer! And he must be a Climate Change Denier, cuz we all know trees help to filter carbon from the air.
Didn’t we go to plastic to save the trees to begin with? Now back to paper?
First we have a new ice age coming. Then global warming. Then it is climate change because all the blizzards that follow Al Gore prove that God has a sense of humor. Then the climate change people insist the cooler weather is just an example of wild swings in weather and “climate change” and not evidence. Of course, they told us that we would experience more hurricanes and more severe ones. They make fun of Pat Robertson for saying voodoo might be to blame for Katrina, but they’re not equally off their rockers for blaming Katrina on American automobiles? This hurricane season? Looking real wrong for climate changers. So wrong…..they must suspect cheating somehow. Nobody is this wrong!
The gulf oil spill? Where is the continued devatation that was promised. Cuz we are so capable of destroying the planet. Nevermind the bizillions of gallons that seep naturally into the water.
So now plastic bags are evil incarnate. Paper is better. Let’s face it people. They just get off telling us what to do.
Britt: Just one correction to your rant…no one claims we’ll destroy the planet…just make it uninhabitable for people. George Will always misses that distinction when writing on environmental issues as well.
Several years ago when McDonalds switched from styrofoam to cardboard boxes for its burgers, there was an article in Science magazine about the switch and The Law of Unintended Consequences. In a nutshell, the new cardboard containers, which were coated with plastic to stop them from getting soggy, consumed more energy to produce than styrofoam, produced far more toxic waste by-products in their manufacturing, and were only slightly more bio-degradable than styrofoam.
The same comparison is true about paper versus plastic bags. Plastic bags, when properly recycled, have a far smaller environmental impact than paper bags.
And what about those cloth reusable bags? Independent testing has determined that after a few uses they frequently contain high levels of bacteria, yeast, mold, and coliform. In one study, 64% of the bags tested had some level on contamination and over 30% had bacterial counts that are considered unsafe in drinking water. Yum-yum.
BTW, Britt Howard. You need to do some reading on the subject of global climate change. The science is pretty clear that it is happening. The jury is still out on how much of it is caused by human activity. For example, when the Earth warmed up from the last Ice Age there was an estimate 5 million humans on the entire planet. Their carbon footprint consisted solely of camp fires and farting.
Steve, by technicality you have a point. It isn’t like the planet will be blown up and obliterated from the universe. Even with nuclear weapons that probably isn’t true.
Still, in a sense, many consider the Earth to be “alive” and that by making it unihabitable, we kill it or “destroy” it. Makes sense to me. I just think it is harder to make it uninhabitable than it is suggested.
And I have indeed heard that claim, but the global warming guy saying so, meant it the same way when he used the word “destroy”. Nothing like an exploding planet krypton was really implied. No hurtling Al Gore to another universe to become Captain Planet with super powers.
So, really we’re talking about semantics. George Will huh? I consider that good company.
HisRoc, what isn’t disputed is that we go through cycles of climate change regardless of any carbon footprint. There are solar cycles to contend with. Evidently those temperatures during the age of dinosaurs were much warmer. And did dinosaurs fart?
Carbon’s role in any of this has recently been disputed in a recent study.
Kinda pointless to research while there is so much incentive to BS your findings. Too easy to find research that says something completely different. To easy to find examples of faked outcomes.
I’d rather rely on what was accepted prior to the big bucks getting involved. The carbon tax credit industry relies on a certain result, the oil industry another. So, real science gets ignored until contaminated funded results are rooted out and the fakers severely dealt with.
Britt,
We are not that far apart in our viewpoints. Cap and trade, for instance, has now been debunked by the economists who invented the concept. And, even if we decided that global climate change is exacerbated by human activity, the figures don’t add up to it being containable, unless we literally halted all industrial activity, stop consuming all fossil fuels, and return to a world-wide agrarian economy. In that case, we would slow climate change, but not reverse it.
But as John Maynard Keynes famously said, in the long run we’re all dead.
HR: Well in the long, long run, we’re either all dead or we’ve left this planet. We need to keep it livable until we’ve created the technology to leave, though.
The only objective of all these leftist “do good” schemes is to raise money for their pet projects and grow totalitarian government, not to fix any problem. Look at the big tobacco settlement fines. The money was supposed to go to fund medical payments for smoking related health problems and anti smoking programs. Ha ha. We all know what it went to.
When they find out all the bad things caused by their “solutions” they blandly say that proves they need more taxes to pay for a solution to their “fix” to the “problem”. Get the idea?
SV,
The clock is already ticking, regardless of global climate change. Most scientists believe that the next Ice Age will occur in 10,000 to 20,000 years. When it comes, most of North America will be covered by up to half a mile of solid ice. I am reading an excellent book right now titled, “Physics of the Impossible.” The author, Dr. Michio Kaku (who developed String Theory) believes that faster-than-light space travel will be possible when breakthroughs in our knowledge of physics allows the harnessing of enormous quantities of energy in a very confined space. Without going into all his reasoning, he believes that these breakthroughs will take anywhere from a thousand years to up to a million years from now. Lets hope his low-side estimate is correct. To put things in perspective, it was less than 150 years ago when Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetism and as recently as the 1930s most physicists insisted that rockets wouldn’t work in outer space because they would have nothing to thrust against in a vacuum.
HR-True. Of course we wouldn’t HAVE to have faster than light drives to leave. We’d just need the technology to build big space arks, because it would take several generations to get anywhere interesting.
SV,
Dr. Kaku addresses that potential, as well as suspended animation flights. The problem is two-fold. First, at sub-light speeds the spacecraft would be subject to numerous potentially fatal hazards, including meteors and other collision obstacles and radiation. Second, exploration for Earth-like planets. Most of the potential systems in our galaxy would take centuries to reach at sub-light speed. By the time an “ark” or suspended animation crew got there and reported back, the discovery would most certainly be “overcome by events” back on Earth.
I don’t believe the alternative to plastic bags are paper bags. What I observe being pushed are usuable cloth bags with handles on them that we will be taxed into buying that then bringing with us to place our groceries into. This will reduce the cost to grocery stores as they will no longer have to pay for any bags.
Taxes as a form of behavior modification that Progressives can’t force upon us any other way.
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