Policy Wonkery

California is in the midst of considering a ban on single-use plastic bags and adding a small mandatory fee for recyclable paper bags.  After passing the Senate Environmental committee on June 28th and winning an endorsement by the California Grocers Association it looks like Assembly Bill 1998 has legs.

My home turf, Washington DC, enacted a District-wide tax on plastic bags this past January.  I and other Beltwayers now pay a 5 cent tax on plastic bags. A portion of the fee goes to the store and the rest goes to a fund to clean up the Anacostia River.

While I instinctively jumped to the conclusion that Washington DC’s method was preferable to the Californian ban, I’m now more skeptical.  The economist in me immediately identifies the problem: clearly the cost of plastic bags (free) doesn’t reflect their public cost (for example, the $25 million California spends each year cleaning them up).  A tax could address that problem.  If bags are taxed sufficiently, then fewer people will use them and the cost of their clean-up will be part of the price.

However, the scale of this problem exceeds our measure of the cost.  Less then half of a percent of plastic bags are recycled, yet they take over a thousand years to biodegrade.  For those bags that aren’t thrown away and instead blow into the ocean, they contribute to the environmentalist nightmare known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  These problems are almost beyond redress because the exceed the human capacity for understanding.  These are costs that involve an ethic of planetary stewardship that exceeds our generational expectations, though the same may not be said of future generations.

For now, we can celebrate the surprising position of the California Grocers Association (CGA),  the industry association for grocery stores, which came out in support of the bag ban. Despite the potential impact on grocery store consumers unused to shopping with their own bags, the CGA prefers the ban as  “a unified statewide standard.” They believe the alternative, a collage of city-by-city legislation, would be more disruptive to business.

It comes as no surprise that the paper and plastic industries oppose the ban. Big Paper will have to adopt better practices and produce paper bags with 40% recyclable material, and  the plastic industry will be out of the business until they can develop biodegradable plastics.

I would encourage states to replicate either the District or Californian model as the first priority should be to address the profound environmental costs of a rather insidious object of convenience (read: “plastic bags”). Hopefully, academics will pursue comparative studies on this issue over the next couple of years.  I’m particularly interested in the findings of behavioral economists or sociologists.  I wonder if the environmental ethic of choosing to carry a bag leads to further environmental action or if it will be used as justification for buying an SUV.

So, I watched this movie last week for the second time, just to show it to my girlfriend. I highly recommend it.  Most of my previously reading about alternative energy taught me far more about how wind power kill birds than about the consequences of hydraulic fracking (the process of injecting a chemical water mix into the earth while drilling for natural gas).  This movie explores the dangers of this process, which carries major effects for the environment and the health and economic well-being of people across the United States.

Also, some great related news: the state of New York — the subject of much scrutiny in Gasland — is close to passing a bill that would take decisive action to place a temporary moratorium on fracking. Here’s hoping for a happy ending.

Today a great video come out of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority. It demonstrates how new technologies empower municipal government to adopt efficient pricing models. Also, really cool visualization; congratulations to whoever put this together.

SFpark Overview from SFpark on Vimeo.

Things are about to get really exciting: I’m going to talk about e-filing tax returns, perhaps the most nerve-racking and boring subject ever.  However, there is good news. California has a program called ReadyReturn that fills out half the form for you with all the information the state has already collected.  For those of us who aren’t Californians there is still hope. Obama pledged on the campaign trail to direct the IRS to

[g]ive taxpayers the option of a pre-filled tax form to verify, sign and return to the IRS or online.  This will eliminate the need for Americans to hire expensive tax preparers and to gather information that the federal government already has on file. (Politifact)

Now what’s the bad news? Intuit, owner of Turbo Tax, is rightfully scared that if filing taxes becomes easy enough to do on your own, you won’t pay them to prepare your taxes.  So, they’ve invested over $1.25 million on lobbyists and $2.12 million on campaign donations in the state since 2005 (LA Times).  That’s a lot of money, and their only ask is to prevent this pilot program from going statewide.  Now in addition to the glowing tax payer response to the quality of the program,

it [also] costs California $2.59 to process a paper return, and only 34 cents to process a ReadyReturn, the state says. For the coming fiscal year, it expects that the program will save about three times as much money as it costs to operate, and that’s assuming that only 160,000 of the two million eligible taxpayers use it. (NYT 01/24/2010)

Sadly, Intuit — rather then focusing on improving services like Mint, a Web 2.0 financial planning software — is asserting its role as a legacy industry.  There is a reason the American people believe that government is innately less efficient then industry, but what many fail to realize is that industry often times actively  prevents better governance.  No where is this more clear then in the world of e-governance.