Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Is this a joke

San Francisco may become the first city in the nation to charge shoppers for grocery bags.

The city's Commission on the Environment is expected to ask the mayor and board of supervisors Tuesday to consider a 17-cent per bag charge on paper and plastic grocery bags. While the goal is reducing plastic bag pollution, paper was added so as not to discriminate. (Emphasis mine)


What the heck?!?!? They are considering taxing plastic shopping bag because they want to reduce plastic bag pollution. That at least makes sense. Though adding the tax to paper bags because they did not want to discriminate between the bags is nonsense. Bags do you have feelings, you cannot make one angry, you cannot promote one over the other.

Of course the article is just throwing out garbage to hide the truth.

""The whole point is to encourage the elimination of waste, not to make people pay more for groceries," said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. "

Actually that is trash also.

"Officials calculate that the city spends 5.2 cents per bag annually for street litter pickup and 1.4 cents per bag for extra recycling costs. "

The real reason why they are considering the tax is because it will save them money. Of course you probably will not see any of the money that is saved returned to the tax payers, will you.

via Of the mind

cube

2 comments:

Sojourner said...

I can't even recall the last time I was offered paper as a bag choice. "paper or plastic?" remember that? It seems so passe now. I was always shocked when people chose paper.....no offense!
They probably just through paper in there just because. You know how legal types are.

Man of Issachar said...

thanks for stopping by ben.

And i agree that they are just trying to pad their budgets.

and i also agree witht he LOSB (i have not been asked if i wanted paper of plastic in quite awhile)