Posted on 11/07/2008 8:40:27 AM PST by BGHater
Morgan Humphries (left) and Robert Urban carry on as usual - shopping with plastic bags.
Mayor Bloomberg wants to nickel and dime you at the grocery store - taxing you an extra 5 cents for every plastic bag you take home.
The controversial charge could raise at least $16 million for the cash-strapped city while keeping tons of plastic out of landfills, city officials said Thursday - but some outraged shoppers aren't buying it.
"Bloomberg is a piece of work," Clemelda Gipson, 39, said outside a D'Agostino grocery store in Chelsea. "Food is expensive and now we have to pay for the bags, too? They should try to come up with ideas and solutions and not just more taxes."
Others said they would bring their own cloth bags rather than pay more at the store.
"I think it's a good idea. There is way too much plastic being used at the grocery stores anyways," said actress Denise Lute. "We need to be eco-conscious. If I'm charged a nickel it'll make me take my own bag."
New Yorkers use an estimated 1 billion plastic bags per year. City officials aren't sure what bags they plan to tax, or how they'd collect it - though they're considering allowing merchants to charge an extra penny per bag, giving them an incentive to track it.
"They're charging sales taxes already. There's not some massive new overhaul or bureaucracy that's needed," said Rohit Aggarwala, Bloomberg's head of environmental affairs.
"We are hoping that at 6 cents a bag, people would change their behavior."
San Francisco bans plastic bags unless they are biodegradable, while a proposed 20-cent fee in Seattle is on hold pending a challenge. In Ireland, a 33-cent fee pushed plastic bag use down 94%.
New York considered a plastic bag tax earlier this year but settled for a mandatory recycling program, figuring most stores would just switch to paper, Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Queens) said.
Ikea tried charging customers a nickel per bag, but when demand for its 70 million bags a year dropped 92%, the chain just eliminated them.
"There's a positive impact on the environment," spokesman Joseph Roth said. "It certainly has not hindered our sales, and it has helped our reputation."
Some grocery chains already give customers a discount for every cloth bag they bring. Whole Foods switched its stores to paper bags this year, even though the plastic industry insists paper bags are worse for the environment.
"This would essentially be a food tax," said Keith Christman of the American Chemistry Council. "It would have major unintended environmental consequences."
Rats. That's all we are in their utopia.
This man is a dictator. He needs to go.
I think we should encourage him. As fouled-up as New Jersey is, we can take a lot of comfort in knowing that there will always be a lot of activity in our retail stores simply because of NYC’s high sales tax and anti-business policies like this.
Silly me, I read the headline and thought ole Bloomy was going to put a tax on Pot sales!
There are plenty of nickel bags in NY already. I think the NY politicians have spent too much time smoking them.
What about all the plastic bag manufacturing jobs that will be lost?
I think he also needs to put a $1 per roll of toilet paper tax on all TP. It could help fund their waste water treatment plants also generate general revenue. People in NY City are so full of crap that it won’t be long until NYC is swimming in black ink.
Par for a city who fines its citizens $50 for “improper use” of a plastic dairy box (the guy was sitting on it) or $60 for sitting on the subway stairs.
Next step, a “breath tax” for exhaling CO2.
Political philosophy aside, this would slow down grocery lines a lot, and in many parts of NYC, they already tend to be very very long. I simply gave up shopping at the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle because every time I went in to pick up a couple of items, I found myself at the end of a line so long you literally couldn’t see the cash registers from the end. I once counted over 70 people in line ahead of me — but I had to get out of line and walk around the corner to the area where the registers are to finish counting! Not all stores are anywhere near that bad, of course, but they’re mostly cramped and crowded, and New Yorkers are pretty speed-focused.
my thoughts exactly!!
Couldn’t Bloomberg come up with anything but a whole new definition for “nickel bag?” The pot smokers are gonna love that one for its lack of subtlety.
But we should be able to cash in our plastic bags for carbon credits since the petroleum based plastic used to make the bags is captured carbon that won’t go out and pollute our fragile atmosphere as C02 gas.
This is worse than the mafia’s monopoly shakedowns.
If any institution or group of individuals tried this as private citizens they would be arrested on dozens of RICO and racketeering charges.
Princeling Bloomberg the First however is the iron fist of the law. His bowel movements are regularly bronzed and put on display in the MOMA I hear.
The major difference between mafia and government is the cut of the suit. At least with the mafia, you know their shakedown isn't just moral preening.
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