Man, gotta keep an eye on them all the time. A legislator proposes a nifty new "fee," i.e. tax:
A bill has been proposed that would have consumers paying .10 a bag for grocery bags.
If passed, the bill, introduced by northern Indiana State Representative Shelly VanDenburgh, would act as a type of tax.
According to the bill, 25% of the funds collected would go to the Indiana economic development corporation for the green industries fund, the other 75% would go to schools.
If passed, retailers would be required to have reusable bags for sale.
And a Republican who doesn't want to be left out of the fun thinks it woul be neat to give schools even more to do and today's students even less privacy:
State Senator Beverly Gard (R-Greenfield) has proposed legislation that would require school corporations to collect information on students' heights, ethnicities, ages, sex and even their weight.
Once students step on the scale their weights would be entered into a statewide data system that would help officials determine which part of the state has the most problems with obesity.
But some parents say revealing their kids BMI is TMI.
And what would the state do if it discovered one part of the state had a bigger problem with yoot obesity? Send in the fat police to confiscate Twinkies?
Do legislatures attract busybodies or turn normal people into busybodies? Little bit of both, probably.
Comments
"And what would the state do if it discovered one part of the state had a bigger problem with yoot obesity? Send in the fat police to confiscate Twinkies?"
That is PRECISELY what they would do.
For decades I have said it is not enough for people to plan on no social security and save. People have responded by saying they do not plan on SS and are not worried. The problem is if you are the only one who saves, you will end up getting taxed to death for little things we currently pay no tax on Movie Theaters are an example. Now in order to pay for schools and "Economic Green" companies, they are planning on a 10 cents a bag. I think I use about ten bags a week, $2 at 52 weeks a year = $104 just for plastic bags. I recycle the bags.
Squeezing the people works for a short period of time and basing future income on a tax like this is like building a house on sand, prone to failure. People will adapt and use something else.
The way to get people to use fewer bags is to have the store charge for bags such as Aldi. For the government to get involved in retail such as this is wrong.
Green companies need to compete in the market based on their own merits. Otherwise the government gets on the hook for projects like "Clean Coal", "Ethanol" and "Electric cars $7,500 tax credit." The market place and price should be the motivation for inovation, not some politicians wishful thinking.
Mr. Larsen, I have no problem with stores charging for bags. I often shop at Aldi, and note that the bags they charge for are substantially better than the bags used at other stores.
A tax on bags is acceptable, I suppose, but not my favorite form of tax. My wife recycles the bags by picking up the fertilizer my dog leaves, and many of my neighbors do the same thing, and if they start a tax of 10c on the bags, I suspect most of my neighbors would become considerably less neighborly about picking up after their dogs.
Supermarkets pay about 1c apiece for t-shirt bags, but they pay several dollars per customer on advertising and price reductions to get people to come in and buy groceries. If I were a grocer, I'd tell my cashers not to be stingy with the bags at all. If a customer wants everything triple-bagged, and I am willing to do that while the other store doesn't, that'd be a cheap way to build customer loyalty.
Harl Delos writes "suppose, but not my favorite form of tax." I am not sure what you mean by this. You either think it is appropriate or it is not. You state it is not your favorite form of tax. So I take it we may not dissagree on the premise.
For others who like this form of tax, this is a slippery slope so to speak. A user tax in my opinion is acceptible if it is a dedicated tax that covers the cost related to its counterpart. For example, the toll road in IN that was leased charged a toll that paid for the principal and interest on the bond, employees, pensions, maintenance of the road. The state wanted to make money from the toll road and leased it. This in my opinion is taxing Peter to pay Paul. This is no longer a dedicated tax in my opinion, but a means to make money for other uses.
Applying a tax on bags could very well lead to a tax on cans, jars, cardboard boxes, pallets and more. The supply and demand part of cost analysis becomes corrupted and artificially changes the rules. Companies that invested in cardboard could see there investment evaporate if people stopped using cardboard. The same goes for glass, plastic, etc.
More than thirty years ago I suggested and recommended that the FICA tax be cut in half and cut benefits in half as well. The thought was that this would stimulate the economy far more than increasing the tax by allowing millions of people to make individual choices as to where to save and spend their money, thereby diversifying our economy. It is obvious this did not happen, just the opposite; tax and base increase, tax on benefits and increased in full retirement from 65 to 67. We now find that there is wide spread support for reducing FICA taxes as we saw in the Make Work Pay in 2009 and its extension in 2011. There are even calls by employees to make it permanent so that it reduces cost making them more competitive.
I am not sure what your view of Social Security, Medicare and New Healthcare bill is, but this type of proposed 10 cents a bag tax could easily be expanded to every item produced and sold in the U.S. to pay for these unfunded liabilities. In simple terms few would ever know the full tax they pay unless they counted all the pennies.