September 13, 2015
Bag This Tax
Normally,
I write about matters which have national import, but bear with me as I
discuss the Washington, D.C. tax on plastic bags. I chose it because I
think it is a perfect illustration of how foolishly government behaves.
If one wanted a better example of how elected officials jump at any
chance to control behavior using tax laws, rely on unscientific bases
for legislation, and then waste the new revenue they get on phony
propaganda lying about the effectiveness of their program, they could
find no better example than D.C.’s tax on plastic bags.
History
Like many really dumb ideas, this one started in San Francisco. In 2007, San Francisco banned disposable plastic grocery bags.
Washington
D.C.’s city council jumped on the bandwagon, imposing a five-cent tax
on plastic bags given out by grocery, convenience, and liquor stores.
They ignored consumer plaints that these were valuable for toting
groceries, were reused in countless ways -- from wrapping garbage to
picking up after their dogs -- and were not being littered about.
Instead they claimed the funds were needed to clean up the Anacostia
River, targeting plastic bags as a major source of river pollution
To
date, the evidence indicates the program -- designed to control
behavior and not incidentally to add more revenue to the city’s coffers
-- has not changed behavior. Moreover, the money was being misspent
outside the clear terms of the law. The tax has far more detrimental
environmental impact than the bags. It puts the burden on the poorest to
fatten the pockets of a large administrative staff that is spending a
lot of money on feel-good projects and propaganda rather than cleanup.
The government estimates of the revenue generated fails to account for
the illnesses caused by reusable bags. Last, but not least, the
government has put off dealing with the major source of pollution of
the Anacostia River -- industrial waste -- and grossly underestimated
the cost of the fanciful notion that the water easily can be made
swimmable and fishable .
The Tax Did Not Change Public Behavior
In 2013, in an effort to show that the tax was working and changing public behavior, the council relied on a report
by the Ferguson Foundation financed by $60,000 of the bag tax revenue, a
study which claimed the tax had resulted in a sixty percent reduction
of bag use.
In actuality, it was fatally flawed
-- based as it was on a gross overestimate at the starting point. In
fact, the revenue figures gleaned from the affected stores showed no
drop in fee revenue.
If the tax is 5 cents per bag and the revenue total is not dropping, people are buying the same number of bags and not
changing
their behavior. (Of course, it may even have gone up since some are
getting the bags from sources that are not taxed -- like buying the
T-shirt bags online as I have or from veterinarians giving them to dog
owners to aid in clean ups -- none of which shows up in the tax revenue
figures.)
In
response to the claim by the District Official that there was a visible
difference even if the revenue figures showed otherwise, even the
Ferguson Foundation, whose estimate was so flawed, demurred from this
anecdotal defense.
The Revenue Obtained by Misrepresentation has been Misspent
The bag fee has generated $10 million for the Anacostia River Clean-Up and Protection Fund. Washington Post
reporters Amy Brittain and Steven Rich used the Freedom of Information
Act to winkle out how this money is being spent. And the wasteful, if
not illegal, misuse of the money is evident.
70 percent of the $10 million has been spent. About a million of it
went to remediation measures like trash traps and rain barrels but more
than $600,000 was spent on advertising (“Skip the Bag, Save the River”)
and another $29,000 preposterously to ask people how they felt about
litter.
A
good deal of the money was spent contrary to the clear language of the
law to pay for pre-existing salaries, and was covered up by audit
legerdemain.
Plastic Bags Have No Appreciable Impact on Litter, while Reusable Bags Increase Incidents of Intestinal Illnesses
Last year, Lance Christiansen, writing in Reason, reported
that the bags contribute little to solid waste, are not a major cause
of blocked storm drains, and that the “county’s own studies showed that
litter actually increased” when the bags were banned.
From the Washington Post:
out the extent of the pollution, cleaning it up and assessing the cost
of the cleanup -- which may well run to a billion dollars -- is a hard
job. But teaching kids how to milk cows 30 miles away from the river and
paying ad agencies hundreds of thousands of dollars to bamboozle voters
into thinking they are making a difference is the low road easy choice
my local politicians have chosen.
Tell me -- Is it any different where you live?
I write about matters which have national import, but bear with me as I
discuss the Washington, D.C. tax on plastic bags. I chose it because I
think it is a perfect illustration of how foolishly government behaves.
If one wanted a better example of how elected officials jump at any
chance to control behavior using tax laws, rely on unscientific bases
for legislation, and then waste the new revenue they get on phony
propaganda lying about the effectiveness of their program, they could
find no better example than D.C.’s tax on plastic bags.
History
Like many really dumb ideas, this one started in San Francisco. In 2007, San Francisco banned disposable plastic grocery bags.
Washington
D.C.’s city council jumped on the bandwagon, imposing a five-cent tax
on plastic bags given out by grocery, convenience, and liquor stores.
They ignored consumer plaints that these were valuable for toting
groceries, were reused in countless ways -- from wrapping garbage to
picking up after their dogs -- and were not being littered about.
Instead they claimed the funds were needed to clean up the Anacostia
River, targeting plastic bags as a major source of river pollution
To
date, the evidence indicates the program -- designed to control
behavior and not incidentally to add more revenue to the city’s coffers
-- has not changed behavior. Moreover, the money was being misspent
outside the clear terms of the law. The tax has far more detrimental
environmental impact than the bags. It puts the burden on the poorest to
fatten the pockets of a large administrative staff that is spending a
lot of money on feel-good projects and propaganda rather than cleanup.
The government estimates of the revenue generated fails to account for
the illnesses caused by reusable bags. Last, but not least, the
government has put off dealing with the major source of pollution of
the Anacostia River -- industrial waste -- and grossly underestimated
the cost of the fanciful notion that the water easily can be made
swimmable and fishable .
The Tax Did Not Change Public Behavior
In 2013, in an effort to show that the tax was working and changing public behavior, the council relied on a report
by the Ferguson Foundation financed by $60,000 of the bag tax revenue, a
study which claimed the tax had resulted in a sixty percent reduction
of bag use.
In actuality, it was fatally flawed
-- based as it was on a gross overestimate at the starting point. In
fact, the revenue figures gleaned from the affected stores showed no
drop in fee revenue.
If the tax is 5 cents per bag and the revenue total is not dropping, people are buying the same number of bags and not
changingtheir behavior. (Of course, it may even have gone up since some are
getting the bags from sources that are not taxed -- like buying the
T-shirt bags online as I have or from veterinarians giving them to dog
owners to aid in clean ups -- none of which shows up in the tax revenue
figures.)
In
response to the claim by the District Official that there was a visible
difference even if the revenue figures showed otherwise, even the
Ferguson Foundation, whose estimate was so flawed, demurred from this
anecdotal defense.
The Revenue Obtained by Misrepresentation has been Misspent
The bag fee has generated $10 million for the Anacostia River Clean-Up and Protection Fund. Washington Post
reporters Amy Brittain and Steven Rich used the Freedom of Information
Act to winkle out how this money is being spent. And the wasteful, if
not illegal, misuse of the money is evident.
MeasurementsAlmost
for success are admittedly nonscientific and vary widely, and more of
the fund money has been allocated for field trips for schoolchildren and
employee salaries than to tangible cleanup projects on the river and
its watershed.
The
largest grant from the fund so far, $1.2 million, will be paid over the
next two years to send every D.C. fifth-grader on a two-night field
trip at campsites outside the District, some up to 30 miles from the
Anacostia River. Ten thousand children will participate in activities
designed to provide a “meaningful watershed education experience,” such as canoeing, talking about trash, conducting water-quality experiments and learning to milk a cow.[Emphasis supplied.]
In
addition, more than $1.7 million of fund money went toward personnel
costs, according to data provided to The Post under the D.C. Freedom of
Information Act.
The
Post’s review showed that only about one-third of spending and
allocations had gone toward trash traps to clean the river, rain barrels
and rain gardens to catch runoff, green roofs, tree plantings, or
stream restoration.
70 percent of the $10 million has been spent. About a million of it
went to remediation measures like trash traps and rain barrels but more
than $600,000 was spent on advertising (“Skip the Bag, Save the River”)
and another $29,000 preposterously to ask people how they felt about
litter.
A
good deal of the money was spent contrary to the clear language of the
law to pay for pre-existing salaries, and was covered up by audit
legerdemain.
Plastic Bags Have No Appreciable Impact on Litter, while Reusable Bags Increase Incidents of Intestinal Illnesses
Last year, Lance Christiansen, writing in Reason, reported
that the bags contribute little to solid waste, are not a major cause
of blocked storm drains, and that the “county’s own studies showed that
litter actually increased” when the bags were banned.
Further,Professor Eugene Volokh expanded on the unintended consequences of such feel good measures.
the Department of Public Health has warned, “During the warmer months,
the increased temperatures can promote the growth of bacteria that may
be present on [reusable] bags.”
They
encourage users to wash their reusable bags “frequently.” This of
course consumes water -- and if the advice were followed rigorously,
“reusable” bags would consume as much as 40 times more water than
lightweight plastic bags.
Some
dismiss this advice, bragging that they never wash their bags. In those
cases, they are putting themselves and other consumers at risk as
bacteria spreads easily in shopping carts and at checkout counters.
Additionally,
our research demonstrated enormous direct and indirect costs on
California’s consumers. If California’s 12.4 million households spend
five minutes each week cleaning their shopping bags to get rid of germs
and bacteria, the annual opportunity cost would be more than $1.5
billion.
The bag ban is likely to disproportionately burden the working poor and those households on a tight budget.
WeThe True Cause of the Anacostia River’s Pollution and Cost of Cleaning It Up
examine emergency room admissions related to these bacteria in the wake
of the San Francisco ban. We find that ER visits spiked when the ban
went into effect. Relative to other counties, ER admissions increase by
at least one fourth, and deaths exhibit a similar increase.
The
results really should not be all that surprising. As Businessweek
reports, prior research found that few people regularly wash reusable
grocery bags or take other precautionary steps (such as using separate
bags for meat and produce). So, not surprisingly, tests find coliform
and even e.coli bacteria in a significant percentage of bags.
From the Washington Post:
AFiguring
lot of waste has been dumped into the waterway. The Navy Yard, once the
world’s largest producer of naval ordnance, sits on the Anacostia and
has been accused of leaking carcinogenic PCBs into the water for
decades. The riverbanks have hosted a coal gasification plant, a rail
yard, power and gas facilities and other heavy industry, all of which
used chemicals that could pollute the water.
out the extent of the pollution, cleaning it up and assessing the cost
of the cleanup -- which may well run to a billion dollars -- is a hard
job. But teaching kids how to milk cows 30 miles away from the river and
paying ad agencies hundreds of thousands of dollars to bamboozle voters
into thinking they are making a difference is the low road easy choice
my local politicians have chosen.
Tell me -- Is it any different where you live?
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