Imagine the person going from the night shift at Walmart to opening a Wendy’s, they’re getting a coffee and a packaged breakfast at a convenience store on the way to work - they need to give up a buck on each item out of their minimum wage income, then stop at a deposit location on their way home in the brief window between shifts and childcare.
I see where you’re going with the idea, but at least in America I don’t think it works in practice with the current state of income and financial stability disparity.
I doubt any meaningful reform on any issue will not disproportionally affect poor people.
this is probably why the government simply does nothing instead due to the endless bike shedding by constituents.!
I don't think I get the idea. Do you have any evidence to support the claim that charging a poll tax on the purchase of all consumables is a more efficient and effective way to assist the poor than to provide jobs for unemployed people to pick up trash? Introducing such a policy would add a flat tax to tons of the purchases in our economy, I think declaring outright it's the best solution for the impoverished demands a little more supporting evidence than logical sounding rhetoric.
>the government simply does nothing
I guess it depends when and where you grew up, but in my lifetime litter improved significantly compared to how it was when I was growing up in the 90s in Connecticut, and from what I understand it was the result of government-funded marketing campaigns and increased fines and enforcements for littering on public roadways. "Don't Mess with Texas" actually started as a government-funded anti-littering campaign.[0]
Neither of us are in the government (as far as I know), so I think all we can really do right now is discuss our bike-shed designs for solving this problem. If you have any information about why you hold these opinions, I'd be interested to read it - otherwise I don't think we have much to talk about.
I did not claim that a poll tax (which again is called a deposit fee) is more efficient than providing jobs for unemployed people to pick up trash.
In any case bottle deposits are already known to be effective:
https://www.bottlebill.org/index.php/about-bottle-bills/myth...
In any case your entire argument could be made about taxes in general. why tax poor people at all? why should the poor pay sales tax? tax does disproportionally affect the poor. if so, how do you plan on making up the revenue? I would assume taxing the middle class and rich? the mere math is such that any sweeping action will disproportionally affect the poor simply because most Americans are poor. the only viable thing then is to do nothing.
Retail sales tax is not universally implemented across the United States, so is at least not essential to the financial solvency of a government. My objection isn't to the general notion of taxing poor people, but of introducing taxes that disproportionately burden the poor. A poll tax disproportionately burdens the poor because it introduces a flat bill paid by everyone regardless of income. A tax introducing a flat bill on all consumable purchases disproportionately burdens people who make more consumable purchases and who have less opportunity to return consumable purchases for the deposit, in addition to disproportionately burdening people for whom 10% or a minimum of $1 is a bigger and more essential portion of their daily income.
Your source from the Container Recycling Institute is supportive of bottle deposits, but bottle deposits are usually 5c a container, not 10% or a minimum of $1, are far less universal than a tax across all consumables, and only implemented in 10 states so far.
>In any case your entire argument could be made about taxes in general.
Only if you simplify it to the point of reducing it to a strawman. I'm trying to be as specific about my critique here as possible: I don't think charging everyone a "a 10 percent or at least a dollar deposit" on every consumable is going to reduce litter effectively without disproportionately burdening the poor, and I think proposing such an egregiously steep and broad tax as a reasonable policy ignores the realities of the people it would disproportionately punish.
Edit:
>any sweeping action will disproportionally affect the poor simply because most Americans are poor. the only viable thing then is to do nothing.
I would request some evidence on this one, too. 55% of workers are paid hourly, and only 1.5% are on minimum wage. Obviously the poverty line excludes a lot of people we would probably consider "poor" but that's still 11.4% of the country. From what I can tell, this claim and your defeatist conclusion from it have no basis, like your earlier claim that the government "does nothing" to address litter.
[0]https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27... [1]https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2020/home.htm
not to mention, again, it's not a tax, it's a fee, that is given back to you if you want the money back. poor people inherently would be most incentivized to return the packaging thus making the issue moot and your issue irrelevant. or, more pleasantly, stop the consumption of consumables such as soda and fast food that affects them the most anyway in the form of disproportionally high rates of diabetes, obesity and low life expectancy.
(Also I have 666 reputation right now, please don't ruin it)
I used to work at FAANG there, one of the managers was a fun guy. For a month he committed to do the same thing as the people who collect cans - every 04:00am he went around town, collecting bottles and cans. Turns out you can easily make 100-200eur a day with this. But it's a highly competitive business.
There even was/is a bit of a campaign to promote that, e.g. with slogans on bottle labels. Some places also have started putting up small "bottle racks" with trash cans.
I've lived in Germany, and this was one of the things I quickly adopted after seeing the locals doing it. An interesting anecdote is that can/bottle collectors always approached me asking if I'm finished with my drink (I had a drink outside almost daily), but I never felt threatened or anything. They were generally super polite, I'd usually reply with "I'll leave it here" and they went along their way. Very different experience than anywhere else!
It went over like a loud fart in a crowded church.
(I voted for it because so many homeless and poor people collect bottles and cans for income.)
It's not an occasional wrapper. It's the block of cheese I finished off when cooking dinner yesterday, the container of mushrooms I emptied, the bag of tortillas. Most household trash just changed from "toss in the trash and it gets dumped somewhere" to "bring to someone to check each item for completeness"?
I'm sure we'd end up with a lot less single-use packaging as a result, but we use single-use packaging for a reason and your proposal amounts to a near-ban. Let's not pretend this is a simple "just charge a deposit and littering stops". It's "charge a deposit, discover the deposit is non-viable, and single-use packaging as a whole stops".
The other commenter's "just put a QR code" helps a lot, but it still makes household trash much more burdensome than the current "put it in a bin and someone collects it" system. How much would you pay to not have to take your kitchen trash somewhere and scan each piece? That's the overhead here.
I don't know what the implementation is like in the USA, but perhaps it's an inconvenient implementation that's to blame, rather than the entire concept?
I guess a big difference is that in Europe, I can just walk 5 minutes to the nearest supermarket and deposit the recycling there. I think if the basic infrastructure is set up correctly, recycling is easy. It's the same amount of effort as throwing away non-recyclable waste.
In Denmark, small shops must refund at least the bottles they sell. Normal or large shops must refund all deposit bottles and cans.
Most people take the empties to a supermarket. People drinking in a public place often leave them for bottle collectors (often homeless etc) to gather.