Talk Elections

San Francisco city officials are considering a 17-cent surcharge on of all things---grocery bags. You've got to love The People's Republic of San Francisco and their supreme leader Gavin Newsom. If this isn't a tax on the poor, I don't know what is.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/01/26/bag.fee.ap/

Everyone buys groceries.  While this is a big of an odd policy, if one thinks about it, the rich would pay the most for this.  See, the poor people and those of us that are environmentally concious use those handy little reusable bags - save a tree, and now 17 cents.  The rich people, however, don't care.  So its not really a tax on either the rich or the poor.

Unless stores pass the tax on to consumers directly, it's not going to cause the delared desired affect.  However, given that it's supposed to only affect stores that have over $2 million in grocery sales, it's essentially a supermarket tax instead of a grocery tax.  So in the name of "helping the environment" this tax would give more expensive convienence stores and neighborhood grocerys an advantage.  Gotta love the law of intended consequences.

Which results in arbitrage of plastic bags from the small stores to the large stores...some enterprising young chaps selling bags for a dime a bag outside your local Safeway...

Everything is already expensive in San Francisco. This doesn't change a damn thing.

I would carry my groceries in my environmentally friendly dolphin skin bags!

San Francisco's justification, from what I understood, is that the city is spending thousands of dollars every year cleaning up this crap.  If that's the case, passing the costs down to the people who use grocery bags makes sense.