As reported here, the California Legislature has now passed the first statewide plastic bag ban in the nation. As of this writing, Governor Brown has yet to sign the bill into law but no one expects him to fail to do so.
Those interested in reading the full text of the SB-270, along with other pertinent information about it, can find so here.
Webster’s defines a boondoggle, in part, as: “an expensive and wasteful project usually paid for with public money.”
As the linked article makes plain, SB-270 “includes $2 million in loans to help manufacturers shift to producing reusable bags.” That’s $2 million in taxpayer funding, or, as the definition states “public money” but that’s just part of what makes these local and, now, statewide plastic bag bans so wrong.
As the article also makes clear: “For years, a statewide plastic bag ban has been an elusive goal for lawmakers trying to reduce the buildup of plastic waste in oceans and waterways that costs millions of dollars to cleanup.”
If, however, the true goal is to “reduce the buildup of plastic waste in oceans and waterways,” why is there no increased attempt to prosecute and punish the people that actually create that litter? Banning all such bags because some people are irresponsible and litter is akin to banning all cars because some people drive irresponsibly and crash them.
These bans focus upon the items in question, not, as should rightly be the case, the irresponsible or illegal ways people choose to use them. These bans represent little more than a patronizing and hyperactive government (in this case, in Sacramento) presuming to tell a population that it is government, and not the people, who knows best what products consumers should or should not use.
The very same can be said, and, in fact was said, of the Long Beach City Council when it passed its own local plastic bag ban in 2011. When the Council passed that ordinance, it relied upon dated information from a County study that did not even include Long Beach in its dataset. As the State legislature has now done, Long Beach passed its own ban under the pretense of a desire to mitigate litter, even though the Council had no data to demonstrate how many of the plastic bags within its jurisdiction actually appeared in the local litter stream. Long Beach conducted no scientific study of its own to accurately quantify the scope of the challenge before passing its ban and has conducted no study since to determine whether the ban actually did anything to solve the problem.
Even if the Long Beach Council did choose to conduct a study now, there is no pre-ban data against which to compare it. How convenient for them.
Another question that, to my knowledge, has yet to be asked is just where state or local government believes it derives the authority to pass such bans of products that are otherwise legal to make, sell, purchase, and use? Another is, where -outside of the power to lay and collect taxes- do these governments derive the authority to mandate that a business charge anything for a product such as paper bags, let alone how much, let alone what they can and can’t do with the proceeds from those sales?
Does it occur to anyone in California or Long Beach to question whence the state or local legislatures derive the authority to pass such laws? Does anyone there see that the very pretense used to pass these laws (litter) is nothing but a red herring intended to encourage popular support? These legislatures routinely refer to these bags as “single-use.” This, too, is a falsehood. Everyone I know of who uses these bags also re-uses the, sometimes several times, before properly disposing of or recycling them at their local markets.
Meanwhile, because some activists in local and state government have decided that plastic bags are bad, they have abused their authority and decided for an entire population which bags people can and cannot use. Bags that, despite this, remain entirely legal to make, sell, purchase, and use. Because of this activism, legislatures are now dictating terms to legal businesses concerning what sort of bags they can provide to their customers…and how much those businesses must charge for alternative bagging options.
Is this truly the sort of activist legislative environment in which the majority of people in Long Beach and California want to live?
Truly?