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Comment by mostlyjason | Hacker News Reader

No one cares because the perceived cost is zero. Burning your recycling just externalizes the cost to the environment. If I lived in one of those cities, I’d encourage the city to increase disposal fees so they can do it properly. If people are too poor to pay the fees, then add a sales tax on wastefully packaged products to subsidize disposal fees for low income earners. If business can earn more profit or increase volume by using better packaging, then they’ll do so.

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>If people are too poor to pay the fees, then add a sales tax on wastefully packaged products to subsidize disposal fees for low income earners

That just punishes the low income people again.

Taxes on goods disproportionately affect poor people because the tax is a larger portion of your purchasing power the lower your income is.

A rich person, or even a middle class person, isn’t going to be put out of their habits by a couple of cents.

The tax should still be on the purchase price. If essential goods end up too expensive for poor people, then the answer is to raise income levels for poor people via some kind of redistribution.

In order to solve the problem systematically, incentives need to be aligned so that desired global collective outcomes emerge from local individual choices.

If the cost isn't on the purchase price, there's little incentive on consumers at the point of purchase to choose a product with a cheaper disposal cost. Disposal is geographically and temporally remote; and if you're poor, you can economize on it by cheating (littering, fly tipping, illegal burning, man with a van who takes the problem off your hands, etc).

And because the percentage of income one spends for "packaged products" is gets lower the richer you get (and gets capped), the rich can just put aside a "pollute as much as I like" percentage of their income just for not having to care about recycling.

Being rich implies being able to consume more. That’s the difference between rich and not rich.

No, that's a trailer park idea of the rich.

Being rich implies more wealth and power, which is different than consumption, and that is the actual difference between rich and not rich.

Rich people can and do consume more, but, unless you're some kind of gaudy nouveaux into bling or Saudi oil heir, there's only so much you can spend on the kind of "packaged products" we're discussing (and clothes, foods, gadgets, and so on) as part of your everyday life.

Rich will buy a fancier car (or cars), a nicer house (or houses), etc, but those are long term anyway, and can even be investments in themselves. They don't get new "packaged products" in any substantial number more than middle class people.

https://slate.com/business/2013/01/yacht-economics-rich-peop...

It’s the same definition, being able to consume more means having the power to consume more.

A bigger home, traveling further, fancier cars, are all more polluting than a few “package products”. I would bet an accurate tracking of externalities (especially due to extra fuel usage due to extra travel), rich people wouldn’t just be able to ignore it.

As long as the tax is greater than the cleanup cost, they should be encouraged to do so.

This is a general-purpose argument against charging for anything. Someone won't be able to afford it, so we should make everything free, right? Anytime you charge everyone the same price it'd going to be regressive, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have prices, because prices are what prevents overconsumption and shortages.

The key is that the money from charging for "sin taxes" needs to be given back in a way that's progressive. Either give everyone the same amount or overweight giving the money to poor people.

(Price discrimination also helps; often you can figure out how to charge more for people that can afford it.)

>This is a general-purpose argument against charging for anything. Someone won't be able to afford it, so we should make everything free, right?

No.

You extrapolating a very specific argument to the nonsense degree and it not making sense anymore doesn’t mean the original argument was invalid.

Nor does it mean the original argument was an endorsement of your extrapolation.

My point is that when you say "X is regressive" - well, lots of things are regressive. That's how prices work. If you want to fix it, you have to look at income.

There are levels. You can't just say well all same prices are regressive, so dismiss any attempts to prevent exacerbating it. Also, it's foolish to say income is the only place it can be fixed. Reducing poor public spending, subsidizing preferences, acknowledging taxing as punishment isn't always the best solution (even if it works), encouraging public awareness, etc etc are all there.

Yes, I agree that there are a lot of different things we can do.

However, sometimes, charging different prices based on income is impractical. Gas needs to be more expensive to discourage its use (to combat global warming), and it's not practical to ask people their income when they buy gas.

This is especially true when we're talking about prices that aren't charged to consumers directly, but will get passed on to them.

So, to avoid affecting poor people too much we need to compensate for that. The idea is that if you spend less than average on the things being discouraged then you come out ahead.

Why should consumers pay those fees or taxes? Businesses ultimately cause the problem by producing disposable goods, and should bear the cost of disposing their goods, not consumers. Charge manufacturers per-product based on how much of a cost/environmental impact it is to dispose of that product (and packaging!). Something like a 1¢/gram of plastic produced, charged to manufacturers, could make it more painful to produce wasteful products like bottled water and Keurig cups.

But those costs will be passed onto whoever's buys their bulk products, who will then un turn pass the cost down to the end of the chain - consumers. It just makes everything cost more for end users still.

This argument fails the basic economic sniff-test. In such an environment where packaging waste is taxed any business that can figure out cost-effective ways to reduce the waste footprint of their product gains a competitive advantage that they can use to either increase profits or pass on the the consumer to gain market-share.

> Businesses ultimately cause the problem by producing disposable goods

People cause the problem by buying disposable goods. No business will produce something that nobody buys…

Yes, and the idea is here: make the disposable goods expensive to buy so people stop buying them.

On the other hand, businesses create needs no one had through advertisement and all kinds of psychological manipulation (which they study intensely) all the time...

If we disallowed ads, the kind that are manipulating everybody that a beer will get them laid and a new car will make them a better version of themselves, consumption would fall to much lower rates (and fact that what happened at periods when media went on prolonged strike).

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