Bananas wedged under my arm and a box of Cheerios clenched between my teeth, I stumbled out of Safeway draped with food. Intent to avoid paying the five cent tax on shopping bags, I opted for an armload at the price of my comfort. My grocery shopping has become an exercise in tax dodging, and if the woman next to me on the shuttle holding 4 gallons of orange juice in her hands was any indication, I am not alone. Since the D.C. bag tax was implemented last month, the popular reaction has been evasion. In this city plagued by poor governance, we should all be more defiant, and not just when it comes to silly new taxes.
| Ian Hosking on the D.C. bag taxIAN HOSKING and ANDREW TOMLINSON / THE EAGLE |
Responding to this self-defeating law, shoppers and sellers alike have gone to extraordinary lengths to thwart the tax man. Stubborn customers are carrying groceries by the armful, all for the sake of five little cents.
A nickel should be a small price to pay for the convenience of bags, but the people of Washington have decided that it is worth more to protest. This can stop at shopping bags or it can continue to grow. The bag tax is hardly the first piece of ill-conceived legislation in this town, and it is very far from the worst.
Of the many instances of government failure, the D.C. public school system is perhaps the most tragic. Despite spending the most money per pupil in the nation ($21,450), the District’s students have consistently been among the worst performers on standardized tests. This is a classic example of what happens when the costs of a bad law are spread out across a population, while the benefits of that same law are concentrated on a special group.
The laws that have hurt the school system have been passed because they help a few teachers enormously while the societal cost is diffused throughout the District’s population. It makes little sense that schools are unable to fire incompetent teachers. Yet because this law helps teachers, they have an enormous incentive to work for its passage. The average citizen does not have the same motivation, so the effort to oppose is not commensurate with the harm.
The answer to this problem of special interests corrupting city affairs is precisely what we have seen in response to the bag tax: overreaction and defiance. People have been protesting a nonsensical law with effort disproportionate to the cost to themselves. Five cents, like the individual cost of a damaging education law, is barely anything and yet it has driven collective dissent. If this willingness to devote great energy to oppose a harmful law can be applied to the great problems of D.C., perhaps some good will actually come from the bag tax. The Anacostia River will not be getting any cleaner, but the government just might.
Ian Hosking is a sophomore in the School of Public Affairs the College of Arts and Sciences and an ignorant columnist for The Eagle. You can reach him at edpage@theeagleonline.com.
