Law on Rice

Mayor Nickel’s $0.20 plastic bag tax will soon go into effect for Seattle grocery shoppers. To me, the tax has the right intentions, but gets it wrong for three reasons.

First, the 20 cent bag tax is plainly a tax on the poor. Carrying around those clunky totes is no problem for those among us with Volvo station wagons. However, when I was riding the very packed buses to work through Seattle’s International District, Central District, and parts of Mount Baker, I saw a lot of big poor families that were having enough trouble hanging on to their kids, let alone having to remember that they might be going shopping that night. If they forget there’s no food in the refrigerator, they’ll probably forget to bring the tote. This isn’t really a problem when you have no kids and you make $100,000 a year. It is a problem when you make $32,000 and have three kids.

Second, the 20 cent bag tax fails to put the cost of the behavioral change on the cheapest cost avoider. That is, the tax should not be placed on consumers. Attempting to get consumers to change behavior is expensive and inefficient compared to what we could do if we taxed the grocery stores for the use of the bags (or if the state charged a tax on their importation). If we did something like that, then the stores or producers would attempt to innovate something better. The best innovation consumers come up with is a dirty old tote.

Third, the 20 cent tax may actually undermine environmental efforts. I say this based on a conversation I just heard in Starbucks this morning. A woman was saying, “they want to charge us for air in our tires, water to drink, and now plastic bags.” The barista, for whatever reason, explained to her how bad the bags are for the environment. The woman was nonplussed. I think the general majority of people lump grocery stores and government into a larger “they,” and so most people won’t really get it. They’ll just see it as yet another burden from “they,” and that may turn the same people off of environmentalism. I think it’s an annoying and unfortunate mistake.