OPINION:
So the geniuses in the Virginia Assembly have made plastic bags at stores cost a nickel a piece. Why? Because, of course, plastic bags are a threat to the environment and charging five cents for each one will greatly reduce the number of plastic bags in circulation. Except that it won’t.
First of all, if I shop once a week and use 10 plastic bags, that’s 50 cents a week, or $2 a month and $24 a year. That’s not much of a disincentive even for those in the lower income brackets. Second, if plastic bags are such a serious threat, ban their use completely. (There, I have solved a great environmental threat.) Third, the tax is inconsequential for the store customer, but most certainly not for the taxing authority. So what we really have is the dishonest Virginia government profiteering off the proliferation of plastic bags in our environment.
Meanwhile, the time to get through store checkout lines has grown exponentially as our fellow citizens who have bought into this grotesque government misrepresentation bring their (dirty) cloth bags to the store. I recall clearly that those cloth bags were banned early in the COVID-19 era because they are so dirty.
I don’t know which is worse —- the never-ending lies perpetrated by our governments (plastic bags, wearing masks for protection against COVID-19, keeping kids out of school, etc.) or those among us who so readily embrace the lies as truth.
BOB SEGAL
Burke, Va.
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