Underground Limestone Castle

Plastic Bag Surgery Tax Disasters

What is the purpose of Government? That's the holy grail of questions, because without it, how the heck do we proceed?
Apparently, we haven't ironed out a reasonable answer to this question, which is why we get stuck either debating things endlessly so that no action is taken, or undertaking actions which turn out to be completely absurd.

What winds up happening is something like the recent grocery-bag tax proposal in the People's Republic of San Francisco, whereby supermarkets are required to charge shoppers seventeen cents per grocery bag, be it paper or plastic. The eminently reasonable folks who pontificate on such matters state that since grocery bags create waste which costs the city money to deal with, consumers should be hit up to cover those costs. Those same pontificators will mention the proliferation of plastic-bag litter in China, and point out that China charges shoppers for these bags. They will then cross their arms, satisfied that their very reasonable assumptions and conclusions have won the oh-so-commonsensical debate.

This is classic punitive taxation, which is generally understood as imposing taxes against products or services that the body overseeing such things finds to be undesirable. What's never clearly laid out is what criterion are used to decide who serves on that body, and how they get to decide what's good for the rest of us.

To some extent, this process must be endured; otherwise, there really wouldn't be any government, much less a democratic one - but we should think carefully about allowing agencies such as the "San Francisco Commission on the Environment" to be submitting legislation to the board of supervisors. For one thing, why does this commission get to make such recommendations, when a voter and taxpayer can generally do no such thing?

Finally, using punitive taxation tends to turn into a kind of club drug for governments; having exhausted existing revenue streams, they scramble to find new ones, and sources that pass taxes on "Bad" things which are inevitably left as vague as possible, such as "Pollution", or smokers, or whatnot generally find that drinking salt water only exacerbates their thirst.

The next time you hear the cry for taxes to be raised - no matter what the reason - think very carefully about how such items were dealt with in the past. Before California became a vicious circle of broken budgets, crummy services, and ever-increasing taxes, it boasted the best infrastructure, schools, and just about everything else under the sun - all for less than what we pay now.

What changed? Nothing, really - if you have a business model that works, an increase in the number of consumers brings better service (or at least, the same level), but not worse. In our case, we expanded the scope of Government for no other reason than the fact that we could - or so we thought.

You may be familiar with the concept of "Tax Freedom day"; it's the point in the year where your earnings are finally yours to keep after fulfilling your tax obligations. For the last several presidencies, that period of time has moved further into the year, meanining it takes more of your time and money to meet your tax responsibilities.

Keep this concept firmly in mind the next time you hear a bureaucrat hyperventilating about how Governor Schwarzenegger is "trying to cut essential services" or that some school is "Dangerously underfunded" - That school or service got by before; why is it a crisis now? Few will answer this question honestly, because they know full well that the bureacracy did not exist before. Now that it is that person's primary job to declare that his agency doesn't have "enough" money, what would you expect him to say to the public?

So when you hear the touchy-feely arguments about how the grocery bag tax will "Help" recycling, or San Francisco's waste, or improve its quality of life, think about how much of San Francisco's problems really have to do with plastic bags floating in the streets, and be more concerned with bureaucrats whose sole purpose in life is to raise taxes in the friendliest way possible. Think of it as taxation with a "human face".

posted by ET @ 3:15 PM