That appears to be the motto of many so-called "blue" (i.e left-wing/progressive) states in America. Two recent headlines demonstrate it.
Blue States Just Can’t Stop Taxing
The latest Census Bureau data on population changes in America should have been a wake-up call to lawmakers in blue states and cities. The Census data provide even further evidence that “soak the rich” tax policies have incited a blue-state meltdown.
California, New York and Illinois all lost the most population last year. These states have nearly lost a combined 5 million people over the last decade. California and New York could both lose another three congressional seats by the end of the decade, and Illinois another two.
Did I mention that these are the three states with the highest taxes?
Is this just a coincidence?
Democratic governors evidently think so. This year, seven blue states are pursuing even higher tax rates on the top 1% of earners, despite the evidence that these policies are detrimental to their citizens.
. . .
Meanwhile, Jonathan Williams, the chief economist at the American Legislative Exchange Council — an association of more than 2,000 conservative state legislators — reports that eight red states are cutting income taxes including Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia. Oklahoma is set to cut rates this year to as low as 2%. Several of these states now have flat taxes, not multiple tier “progressive” rates. Every state on this list is a red state, except Connecticut.
What does all this mean? The blue-state deep thinkers can’t see that their “progressive” tax systems are bleeding their states dry. Or they don’t care.
Law banning plastic bags in blue state backfires as plastic consumption skyrockets
New Jersey’s single-use plastic bag ban has proved unsuccessful in curbing plastic consumption, with a new study showing that plastic use has tripled.
Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) signed a bill that set the bag ban into motion in May 2022 in an effort to address plastic pollution, and he said it “will help mitigate climate change.” The ban, which was the strictest of its kind at the time, restricted retail and grocery stores from providing customers with single-use plastic bags and prohibited grocery stores larger than 2,500 square feet from giving customers single-use paper bags ... The law also banned polystyrene foam food takeout containers and single-use plastic straws unless a customer requests one.
Shoppers resorted to reusable bags ... However, this surge in reusable bags has created its own sort of environmental problem ... A new study by Freedonia Group on Jan. 9 shows that the plastic bag ban the governor touted as “the strongest bill of its kind in the U.S.” has produced the opposite effect. New Jersey residents have used three times the amount of plastic, consuming 53 million pounds of plastic before the law and 151 million pounds after, according to numbers reported by Fox News.
“Most of these alternative bags are made with nonwoven polypropylene, which is not widely recycled in the United States and does not typically contain any post-consumer recycled materials. This shift in material also resulted in a notable environmental impact, with the increased consumption of polypropylene bags contributing to a 500% increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to nonwoven polypropylene bag production in 2015,” the study reported.
New Jersey is not the only state to implement plastic bag bans to help the environment. Twelve others, including Vermont, Oregon, California, and Colorado, have single-use plastic bag restrictions.
Now, if only we could stop migrants from those states to more sensible ones from taking with them the attitudes that ruined their states of origin in the first place . . . Why do so many of them arrive in their new homes, loudly celebrating leaving behind all those restrictive, counterproductive, overbearing state policies, and then vote for people who want to introduce the same problems to their new states?
This gets tiring, to say the very least . . . It's no wonder some of the road signs show evidence of that.
Peter
They forgot Delaware on the list.
ReplyDeleteThey also neglected to mention that people used them for small trash bags, dog poop bags, etc. - they were often used twice.
Now I have to spend on heaver bags for the same tasks.
Sadly they lose people, lose money, run huge deficits and the Federal government bails them out with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.
ReplyDeleteI vacation in Maine, I'm tempted to take a few dozen standard blue grocery bags with me next time and put my stuff in them and walk it out to the car. The silliness of waging a stupid war on plastic is mind boggling.
The last paragraph in your piece reflects the position I have espoused for years regarding the opinions of people moving to Alabama from states with supposedly more enlightened and educated positions on various social norms.
ReplyDelete"The blue-state deep thinkers can’t see that their “progressive” tax systems are bleeding their states dry. Or they don’t care."
ReplyDelete...I live "behind enemy lines" in California. I can tell you... "they don't care..."
The plastic bags: Whatever dingbats thought banning the free ones didn't have dogs. Of course, you CAN go to Petco and BUY poop bags... made of the same plastic... Now my dogs' poop gets the royal treatment in "reusable" grocery bags I had to PAY for. They're STILL ending up in the dump, and will take WAY longer to disintegrate! Meanwhile, the upper-crusties will continue to buy their "organic, cage-free" eggs... in plastic egg cartons...
I'm stuck here on the west coast.
ReplyDeleteSome of my high school facebook friends were just noting today how high their electric bill is this month.
Apparently none of them noticed that the major electric utility in Oregon had an almost 18% rate increase go into effect on January 1st.
Rude awakening.
But that's going to happen when you close down efficient coal plants and replace them with buying wind power on the open market.....
The confusion comes from expecting the plastic bag laws to make sense.
ReplyDeleteIf one changes that assumption to 'Politicians must be seen *Doing Something*, no matter how stupid or wrong, it all works out logically.
The core concept of (pick the name you like) is that the intent and image are everything and the outcome is meaningless.
More poc, more services needed, which breeds higher taxes, which breeds location changes, which breeds more taxes needed.
ReplyDeleteVicious cycle. See detroit, cleveland chicongo, really any city anywhere.
Note One:
ReplyDeleteAround 2000, California added an income tax surcharge, to their already high top tier, of 10% for those who made $1m/yr. They had 28,000 people in that category. 1/3 of them instantly bailed out of the state. (I think the top tier is 11%)
After many attempts to raise it higher, a couple years ago they finally passed an additional 3% tax on the REMAINING 1800 of those making at least $1m. Again, 1/3 of them instantly bailed from the state. (would YOU pay a total tax rate of ~50%? Fed+state. Human nature says hell no! Lots of tax exiles around the world)
Essentially, they have chased all the highest earners away from the state. Only took them about 20 years to chase them, and lots of their businesses, out of CA. Bright move! This clearly indicates that the pols in Sacatomato have shit for brains.
Note Two:
The biggest response to the Free Shopping Bag ban was the sudden deluge of the cities of, mostly, human feces covering the sidewalks. What do you think the homeless were using for waste disposal? Them, and the dog walkers? BTW, the first reported result of the bag ban was the loss of ~5000 jobs in L.A. Those "free" shopping bags were made from waste methane from oil drilling, IIRC. The resusable bags are plastic from petroleum. A lot of it, and those bags will be around for a long time...
BTW, that spay/neuter sign is sort of unneeded. Liberals tend to limit their child output more than conservatives do. Sadly, the conservative side is limited more by the high taxes that hit families to fund the socialist vision.
ReplyDeleteIf the US Census wants to retain its relevancy for helping lawmakers set policy, it better start distinguishing between citizens and illegal aliens.
ReplyDelete