I'm entirely skeptical of the bottle tax"deposit" being applied to yet more types of cans/bottles. Certainly, I'm never going to go and turn in my cans & bottles unless I'm unemployed and saving every penny. They're just going to go into recycling (which I'm paying for anyway, and would use anyway), and the first visible consequence of this going into effect is that the "soda tax" will be applied to many other types of beverages.
I don't approve of legislation that tells me it's doing one thing so that it can sneakily do something else that affects poor people's pocketbooks. Prices have gone up sharply enough in the past decade that I'm unlikely to be in favor of *any* bill that increases the cost of living.
(Unreasonable digression: Why is it that the food prices that spiked when gas prices spiked are not going down when gas prices go down? Answer: Desire for profit, at any cost.)
I'm mostly not worried about bottle types or which beverages they contain. To me it seems there are only two possible right answers. 1) eliminate deposits on all beverage containers. 2). Apply deposits to all beverage containers.
At the moment, we are in between. If you believe in 2, vote to add more container types until we get there. If you believe in 1, vote to stop adding things and work on getting rid of the ones we have. Given the current state of recycling in our state, I'm in favor of 2 at the moment. It's improving, but not there yet.
You have hit on my objection to the proposition. To me, it makes no sense to have a deposit on gallon jugs of water, but not on gallon jugs of milk. I voted against the proposition for this reason.
In answer to why it is this way, I recall someone coming to my door 20 years ago to get me to sign a petition for an initiative very like this one. I asked him why dairy was an exception. He said, because the dairy industry is too powerful. I didn't sign. We shouldn't allow special interests to make our legislation baroque and full of unintended consequences.
I wonder how a bottle bill would do if it just applied to everything, instead of making exceptions for the most powerful lobbies. I'd vote for it, and I'd vote to double the deposit to account for inflation.
However, I do think there is also some truth to the argument that with curbside recycling as common as it now is, the bottle bill may be less necessary than it once was. Younger people probably don't even remember what the litter levels were like before the bottle bill.
Yeah, i was thinking that to me a fair bill would be on every beverage container less than some volume, including to go cups. Seems like THAT would reduce littering.
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I don't approve of legislation that tells me it's doing one thing so that it can sneakily do something else that affects poor people's pocketbooks. Prices have gone up sharply enough in the past decade that I'm unlikely to be in favor of *any* bill that increases the cost of living.
(Unreasonable digression: Why is it that the food prices that spiked when gas prices spiked are not going down when gas prices go down? Answer: Desire for profit, at any cost.)
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At the moment, we are in between. If you believe in 2, vote to add more container types until we get there. If you believe in 1, vote to stop adding things and work on getting rid of the ones we have. Given the current state of recycling in our state, I'm in favor of 2 at the moment. It's improving, but not there yet.
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In answer to why it is this way, I recall someone coming to my door 20 years ago to get me to sign a petition for an initiative very like this one. I asked him why dairy was an exception. He said, because the dairy industry is too powerful. I didn't sign. We shouldn't allow special interests to make our legislation baroque and full of unintended consequences.
I wonder how a bottle bill would do if it just applied to everything, instead of making exceptions for the most powerful lobbies. I'd vote for it, and I'd vote to double the deposit to account for inflation.
However, I do think there is also some truth to the argument that with curbside recycling as common as it now is, the bottle bill may be less necessary than it once was. Younger people probably don't even remember what the litter levels were like before the bottle bill.
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