Bags, Germs and Stealing

Originally published on www.denverlibertarian.com

Denver is jumping on the plastic bag tax train, joining ranks with New York, California and several other Colorado jurisdictions, but will the bag tax be effective at changing habits or improving environmental conditions?

Admittedly, there are far worse tyrannies to suffer than a plastic bag tax, but the subtleties underlying never-ending government expansion and continual attempts at modifying human behavior through legislation are always worth dissecting. Last week, the Denver City Council voted unanimously to approve Council Bill No. 19-1176 which outlines the parameters surrounding a ten cent per bag tax (they refer to it as fee) on single use plastic or paper bags, to be collected by retailers at the point of sale.

The local coverage of this measure is typically presented as a win-win with the presumption that there could never be any ill effects or unintended consequences. Before delving into the details, what might be the most odd thing is that there is a significant amount of media coverage and public comments on social media about a bag tax, of all things. Of course, most of it is self-congratulatory green-washing, but contrast that with the coverage, or lack thereof, of the Afghanistan Papers, wherein the U.S. leadership, intelligence agencies and the Military outright lied to the public for eighteen plus years and revealed that, as Kym Robinson put it in a recent Libertarian Institute article, there was, “No real mission statement, a flawed and corrupt puppet government, massive amounts of waste, uncertain allies and enemies, incoherent unit cohesion and poor communications between allies, unnecessary deaths but ultimately murder.” No one seems to care about that, but a bag tax? Let’s work that into the news cycle every day! Let’s ban the bags and ignore the fact that the military is the biggest polluter on the planet. But I digress, back to the matter at hand.

First off, if the plastic bag tax is such a good idea, why are there so many exemptions? The list of exemptions includes any customer who participates in a federal or state food assistance program, bags used to package bulk items (fruit, vegetables, nails and screws, bags to wrap flowers and bakery goods, etc.), bags smaller than seven inches by nine inches (why not six by eight?), bags from pharmacies, newspaper bags, door hanger bags, dry cleaning bags, and bags sold in packages containing multiple bags for uses such as food storage, garbage, pet waste or yard waste (more on that later). Also exempt are, from the legislation, “restaurants or other businesses where retail sales are clearly secondary and incidental to the primary activity occurring within the business or any temporary vendor or temporary events.” That “clearly secondary” verbiage is a classic legislative loophole where if you have the right connections or know the right person you can find an exemption for your business. All in, of the six pages of legislation, nearly a full page is dedicated to exemptions.

In theory, the intent behind the legislation is to change people's habits. This is true, there will be fewer disposable bags used, because when you tax something, you get less of it, but there is one habit that even the most ardent supporters of reusable bags fail at miserably: washing the reusable bag. Even if the bag does get washed, it won’t be washed it every day, and from the house to the car to the store to the shopping cart, all along the way, you are collecting, transporting and disseminating bacteria to share with everyone else. Where has the person standing next to you traveled in the last day, week or month? Did that bag previously go to the gym with them and what was stored in it? The locations where the bag has been and the types of items stored in the reusable bags are endless. Indeed, a recent study found that only about 3% of people regularly wash their bags. If that doesn’t make you shudder, consider this: in that same study, bacteria was found in 99% of the bags that were tested. That same study also found that half carried coliform bacteria and 8% carried E. coli, an indicator of fecal contamination.

People do adapt and change and perhaps some will wash their bags more frequently, but one thing is verifiably true, and that is that people will just switch from one product to another. With a disposable bag ban in place, studies have shown, as referenced in this FEE.org article, that demand for other bags (4 gallon size, for instance, sold by the roll) to be used as small trash can liners will increase substantially. These types of bags are exempt from the tax in the legislation and are typically thicker than the disposable ones, which ultimately means more plastic is used; exactly the opposite from the stated goals of the legislation.

In a rare moment of honesty, the legislation does acknowledge two economic realities. First, the tax will adversely affect those on the lower end of the economic spectrum and thus, the legislation has exempted anyone on a federal or state food assistance plan. Secondly, if you tax something, you’ll get less of it. If only this economic logic were applied to all other multifarious ordinances.

Finally, what legislation would be complete without the ever popular "you'll get something for free" section? Of the ten cent per bag fee, the retail store may retain four cents that can be used for educational and informational signage, staff training (ostensibly to train them in dealing with annoyed customers) and to provide “free” reusable carryout bags to customers. How is it free? The customer was literally just forced to pay for it. And since when is it the job of a grocery store to educate the public about plastics, or anything else for that matter? This section also highlights the concept of legal plunder, as small businesses, with lower overhead and razor thin profit margins will feel the brunt of the implementation of this tax, when compared to their big box competitors.

There was nothing preventing stores from implementing a plastic bag tax on their own, it just becomes much easier to export morality to the state, dodge the question and say that the state mandated it rather than feeling the economic consequences of self implementation. The green-washing trade off would have been worth it for some stores and not so much for others. It is telling that for all the green-washing rhetoric that has become de-rigueur for some big businesses, that rather than taking the lead and putting their money where their mouth is, they have waited for the state to force the implementation of a bag tax, for the planet, for humanity, and all that.

Think of the owner of a corner market in a lower income neighborhood. Perhaps that owner, seeking to help out their customers, continues to offer bags at the point of sale but gets caught by the bag police one too many times and goes out of business due to the requisite fines or not getting their license renewed. How does that help the neighborhood? It certainly forces them to go farther from home to get to the big box store.

Shockingly, government has gotten in the way of government with the implementation of this legislation. There is a thirty year old state statute on the books (1989 House Bill 1300) which prevents local governments from regulating the use of plastic materials or products. In short, it’s against the law for Colorado cities to ban plastic bags. Of course, since this is the state violating its own laws, nothing will happen. If it were you or me? That would be a whole different story. This is a feature, not a bug, of an overbearing regulatory state, where the state can’t even manage to follow its own rules. Up next, you'll see legislation requiring reusable bag producers to print washing instructions on the bags and the legal creep will continue all the way down to your own home. So, dear citizen, how often do you clean your house?