They enacted a ban on plastic grocery bags here two years ago to eliminate all the extras being blown across fields. Didn’t help, I still see them blowing down the streets, and lots of people re-using their bags because they’re so much more convenient (plus a lot of people would rather just pay the small tax to use the plastic bags). Who knows, maybe in twenty years all of the bags will be gone, but it’s been a huge hassle for everyone both as consumers and for the stores to re-work their checkout lines because it takes so much more time to use these bags.
We also have a nearby town where they started taxing people for sugary drinks like sodas. Last I heard, it hasn’t changed the amount of purchases by any noticeable amount. People just do their shopping in another town and local stores miss out on the profits.
I imagine for the high fructose, the same thing will happen. People will just pay the tax and not care. This really comes down to being just another tax on the poor which doesn’t have any affect on people who make more money. These bans are slowly taking away every option that poor people can afford, when if anyone really cared about changing people’s habits they would make healthier choices the same price or cheaper than the unhealthy ones. Since I make a decent wage, my wife and I tried eating healthy for a couple months. It nearly broke us because good foods cost so much more. I’m not talking about buying all organic, rather just trying to change the type of foods we ate. My wife did a ton of research to find things that we both thought sounded tasty, and they really were good, but we had no money left over to do anything fun so we spent the whole time sitting at home watching TV.
tl;dr – Real change comes from making healthy choices cheaper, NOT by making unhealthy choices more expensive.
Our city banned plastic bags, and it’s completely changed the city. Sure, there’s still plastic trash, but there’s virtually no plastic bags stuck in trees or blowing in the street. Noticed this over the past 8-10 years.
Yeah same, except it was later overturned where I live and they came right back. Luckily, at lesser numbers, because more of us were used to bringing our own by then.
They enacted a ban on plastic grocery bags here two years ago to eliminate all the extras being blown across fields. Didn’t help, I still see them blowing down the streets, and lots of people re-using their bags because they’re so much more convenient (plus a lot of people would rather just pay the small tax to use the plastic bags). Who knows, maybe in twenty years all of the bags will be gone, but it’s been a huge hassle for everyone both as consumers and for the stores to re-work their checkout lines because it takes so much more time to use these bags.
We also have a nearby town where they started taxing people for sugary drinks like sodas. Last I heard, it hasn’t changed the amount of purchases by any noticeable amount. People just do their shopping in another town and local stores miss out on the profits.
I imagine for the high fructose, the same thing will happen. People will just pay the tax and not care. This really comes down to being just another tax on the poor which doesn’t have any affect on people who make more money. These bans are slowly taking away every option that poor people can afford, when if anyone really cared about changing people’s habits they would make healthier choices the same price or cheaper than the unhealthy ones. Since I make a decent wage, my wife and I tried eating healthy for a couple months. It nearly broke us because good foods cost so much more. I’m not talking about buying all organic, rather just trying to change the type of foods we ate. My wife did a ton of research to find things that we both thought sounded tasty, and they really were good, but we had no money left over to do anything fun so we spent the whole time sitting at home watching TV.
tl;dr – Real change comes from making healthy choices cheaper, NOT by making unhealthy choices more expensive.
Our city banned plastic bags, and it’s completely changed the city. Sure, there’s still plastic trash, but there’s virtually no plastic bags stuck in trees or blowing in the street. Noticed this over the past 8-10 years.
Yeah same, except it was later overturned where I live and they came right back. Luckily, at lesser numbers, because more of us were used to bringing our own by then.