It’s true that this tax, like just about any tax, comes with its bizarre exemptions and complications. Bookstores that sell so much as a mint get hit with the tax (bookstore Politics and Prose stopped selling novelty mints in reaction to the measure). Establishments with food and seating are exempt, but only for paper bags. Anti-tax hawks like the Washington Examiner<\/a> are making some rather silly claims about how Marylanders cannot “afford” this tax because it is “unfair, unwarranted and unreasonable.” Baloney. A five-cent Pigouvian tax to account for the negative externality of pollution — the Anacostia chokes with 200 tons of trash from plastic bags every year, according to the WSJ<\/a> — is fair, warranted, reasonable and utterly affordable.<\/p>\n The District of Columbia’s plastic bag tax of 5-cents generated only $150,000 in January, far below analyst’s expectations. But that’s the good news. The number of bags handed out by supermarkets and other establishments plummeted 85%, from 22 million to 3 million. The revenue will go to cleaning up the Anacostia River. As Atlantic colleague […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-516115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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