We shouldn’t laugh too hard at France for voting against basic math and the iron laws of economics this past weekend. In wide swaths of America, voters keep electing leaders who keep regulating our own businesses out of existence while they govern more by anecdote and emotion than by reason or cause and effect.
In Los Angeles, for instance, the city council is set to ban plastic bags because of the city’s unsightly litter problem. The ban will kill jobs and may even lead to more landfill waste and unsanitary food handling. But they’re pressing ahead with the ban anyway, despite a workers’ plea to stop.
The humble plastic bag has become a target of the left, despite the fact that they’re 100% recyclable, employ hundreds of people in the LA area to manufacture them (and 30,000 work in plastic bag manufacturing across the entire US), and the reusable alternatives tend to be made overseas and can host nasty bacteria and toxic lead.
San Francisco banned plastic bags in 2007, and saw no reduction in plastic bag waste in its landfills at all.
So plastic bags are recyclable, sanitary and employ thousands of people. Banning them doesn’t really help anything. But LA is fooling around with this ban while failing to keep its firefighters effective on the job.
Priorities, priorities.
I live in San Jose, we have banned plastic bags. I shop in Santa Clara, they give me bags in Santa Clara (Santa Clara gets my tax …) I like Santa Clara. My dog poo likes the bags from Santa Clara, just like her dog dad. Just wait till your wife goes to the mall… oh oh… no more plastic bags.
“…no reduction in plastic bag waste in its landfills…”
I use grocery store bags in trash cans designed to hold them. I haven’t bought “Glad” type trash bags in 16 years.
Might I assume that the environmentally-aware elites would rather have name-brand plastic holding the nation’s garbage?
*facepalm* … Oh, how INSENSITIVE of me!
I oppose this sort of ban on principle, but this is one I can almost support. If you’ve ever had to repair the damage done to a boat by catching a plastic bag in a water intake, you can learn to really hate plastic bags. With outdrives or outboards, the cooling water intake is on the leading edge or the sides, or both, of the drive leg. If you catch a plastic bag with the drive leg, the plastic covers your water intakes and the engine goes dry and overheats almost instantly if you have raw water cooling, takes a little longer to overheat with fresh water cooling. At minimum, you’re overboard and under the boat removing the plastic. More likely you’re hauling the boat to remove the plastic and replace the pump impellor. And if you’re unlucky and didn’t catch the rising temperature in time, you have major engine damage from the overheating. Yeah, having gone into Alaska’s 40-odd degree water a couple of times to remove a plastic bag, I really don’t like plastic bags!
Let’s ban everything people dispose of improperly!
– when S.F. passed its pooper-scooper law, owners used plastic bags to clean up after their dogs. Will now have to use plastic compost pails?
You guys aren’t getting the point. No one in government ever got anywhere by not doing anything. There’s a problem (Art the yachtsman there seems to have a problem with plastic bags) and our glorious public officials are going to *DO SOMETHING* to fix it, come hell or high water. Never mind that what they do won’t work, never mind it’ll cost the region jobs. All of these things are irrelevant in the face of the City Council standing up to UNNATURAL THINGS like plastic bags, which of course everyone hates because they’re plastic.
And the employment outlook isn’t bad, as far as the City Council is concerned. The city will lose a bunch of private sector Union employees. Their union no doubt contributed 50% or so of its operating budget to the Democratic party, but the individuals are unreliable enough that occasionally they’ll probably vote Republican. When this ban is enacted, the City will need a new “Plastic Bag Ban Enforcement Bureaucracy”. This will employ many more people than the bag manufacturers. They’ll also make more money, so that their Union Dues can be higher, and more money will be contributed to the Democratic Party. Best of all, they’ll be very aware of where their power and their jobs come from, and they’ll be very reliable when it comes to Election Day.
The trick is, what do we do when there’s no private sector anymore, so we can’t raise taxes on Corporations and spend the money screwing up poor people’s lives?
I recently saw a news report of a pelican that had choked on a plastic bag and died. But then I found out that this pelican had been feeding on an endangered species of sardine. So in essence, that plastic bag had helped save an endangered species. Darwinism at it’s best.