New York Becomes America's Third State To Ban Plastic Bags (yahoo.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press: Gov. Andrew Cuomo and fellow Democrats who control the Legislature have reached a deal to make New York the third state with a ban on single-use plastic grocery bags as they worked to finalize budget agreements, officials said Friday. The ban would prohibit grocery stores from providing plastic bags for most purchases, something California has been doing since a statewide ban was approved in 2016. Hawaii has an effective statewide ban, with all its counties imposing their own restrictions....

New York's ban wouldn't take effect until next March. The plan also calls for allowing local governments the option to impose a 5-cent fee on paper bags, with 3 cents going to the state's Environmental Protection Fund and 2 cents kept by local governments.
Meanwhile, Tennessee's state House and Senate have passed a different kind of bill -- one that bans local Tennessee governments from regulating plastic bags, according to local channel WMC.

One Memphis councilman had proposed allowing the use of plastic bags, but with a seven-cent tax to support clean water initiatives. "But that won't happen if the governor signs the bill to 'ban the bans.'"

Comments

But are they all "single use"?

[Kernel Kurtz]

I use plastic bags I get from the stores for kitchen waste, for scooping the cat litter, occasionally to carry packed lunches, and various other things.

So if stores stop giving them out, then I need to buy them instead. The folks who sell (admittedly better quality but also more expensive) bags are probably laughing all the way to the bank.

Re:Let's make this cost more.

[Jahoda]

And there it is, politicians funding their little pork barrel projects.

Or, you know, maybe it's just incentivizing behavior with some harmless service fees that also help serve to cover the negative externalities of paper and/or plastic bags.

Nah. It's just more naked corruption from all those greedy politicians. Good thing there's smart guys like you who REALLY see the truth through the lies.

Government vs market

[Solandri]

That's a common misconception by the left - that the red states oppose anything the left favors out of spite or ignorance. The left advocates a government-centric approach to decision-making. Some government official (elected via what's basically a popularity contest, not an appraisal of competency) decides or appoints people to decide what the population should do.

The red states don't oppose things the left favors per se. They typically favor a market-centric approach. So using your example of incandescent light bulbs, the red states would've preferred CFLs and LEDs compete with incandescents based solely on price. Once their savings in electricity and longevity versus incandescents made them a better buy, then people would've started buying them naturally and incadescents wold phase themselves out. It's pure democracy in action - every individual buyer gets to vote on what type of light bulb they prefer every time they buy one, unlike the statist top-down approach favored by the left. In that respect, the red states will "eventually fall in line". It was never a question of which technology was better long-term. It's a question of which technology is better now and how the transition should proceed.

Likewise, the right has no problem with solar or wind or EVs per se. If they're the better, more cost-effective product, the right will gladly embrace them. They just don't want those things shoved down their throats by government decree - they think every individual should be allowed to decide for themself whether or not to adopt these products.. But the left can't seem to grok this, so they concoct this fantasy where the right oppose anything the left advocates out of spite or ignorance.

Neither method is always right. The market approach can fail in the case of monopolies and certain niche cases summed up by the tragedy of the commons (pollution is the most common example) and the prisoner's dilemma. The government approach fails when the people deciding fail to anticipate unforeseen consequences to their actions (cable and phone monopolies are granted by the government in exchange for things like guarantees to cover low-income areas - arguably the harm of those monopolies far outweighs the good of covering the low income area), or don't adequately search the solution space before mandating a single solution (GSM nearly doomed us because it used TDMA which is horribly inefficient with bandwidth because it assigns a full bandwidth timeslice to users who only need a little or no bandwidth; fortunately the US allowed CDMA to compete and prove itself a superior solution; and eventually GSM adopted CDMA into its spec and modern standards like LTE are based on the orthogonal signaling proven by CDMA).

That's what makes the U.S. approach to government so effective. Tens of thousands of local governments get to try both the regulatory and free market approach. Those who picked one can compare notes with those who picked the other to see who seems to be doing better. If the regulatory approach seems to be working better than the market approach, then numerous states will try adopting it, while others will retain the market approach. And when a clear majority of the states see a benefit to the regulatory approach, then that creates enough political support to pass the regulation on a national level. When you immediately regulate at the national level without sufficient trials at the lower government levels, you short circuit this weeding-out process and could doom us with something like GSM, except we'll never know because you prohibited the alternative before it could ever be tested.