This month, the Los Angeles city council is expected to ban single-use plastic bags. “[T]he ban is an attempt by the city to reduce litter,” says the Los Angeles Daily News. But it is likely to reduce something else: jobs.
“[A] city ban could prompt the layoff of between 20 and 130 employees” at Crown Poly, a plastic bag manufacturer in L.A., according to the Los Angeles Times. Hundreds more could be at risk in the city.
In response to the likely ban, at risk employees have been in front the city council, explaining their argument for keeping bags legal. This video shows what they told the council and how they were received:
"I'm a single mother and my family depends on me and my income that Crown Poly provides for myself," one lady tells the council in the video. "Besides the health insurance that Crown Poly provides for me, it provides for my children as well."
The video text reads: "But some elected officials ignore the real harms of a ban, equating workers to horse and buggy makers."
"So if we were here a hundred years ago," city council member Paul Koretz is quoted as saying, "would we be saying, 'We must not produce automobiles because buggies and buggy whips will--manufacturers won't have jobs anymore?' Of course we wouldn't."
The pro-bag ban argument is fatuous, however.
Consider the San Francisco case, which outlawed the bags in 2007. "San Francisco did a survey and found that 0.6 percent of its litter was from plastics," the Daily News reports. "After they had a ban, plastics accounted for 0.64 percent of their litter. It made no difference." And in fact plastic, single-use bags are recyclable.
So not only will the bag ban likely not bring down litter, it is likely to cause folks to lose jobs. Is there any wonder California is ranked the worst state for businesses?
"Independent agencies" occupy an odd corner of American government. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Labor Relations Board, Federal Communications Commission, and others are nominally "independent" of the president's control—usually thanks to limits on the president's power to fire the agencies' leaders—and thus enjoy seemingly unlimited discretion to regulate American industry.
Until last week, Mitt Romney had trouble getting potential voters to care so much that they would crawl over ground glass to get to the polling station and vote for him. But now, the man and moment may have come together, thanks to employees of the General Services Administration and the Secret Service.
Last Friday, President Obama asked Congress for the power to consolidate government agencies, saying he’d start by rolling Commerce and five lesser departments into a single business and trade department.
AFL-CIO president had a message for leftist activists today in Washington, D.C.: "We’ll make government create jobs, because government action is the only way to create jobs right now."
Looking at Washington these days, one suspects that this is the way things will be for a long time to come. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day (and all that), the massive tangle of dependencies, entitlements, political payoffs, and perpetual pork barrel schemes that is our national government cannot be either taken down or rebuilt along rational lines – if, indeed, it is possible at all – in much less than the 50 years it took to create it.
CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley asked President Obama whether he “can tell the folks at home that, no matter what happens, the Social Security checks are gonna go out on August the 3rd?” President Obama replied that it wasn’t just Social Security checks that would need to go out and that “I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue, because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.”
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell challenged President Obama’s claim to support trillions in serious spending cuts as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling – cuts the president says show he’s ready to anger Democrats to get a deal.
There is something about big, splashy economic development (“eco-devo”) projects that causes even the most conservative politicians to lose their heads. On the stump, they rail against corporate giveaways and crony capitalism. In town halls, they decry backroom deals, preferential treatment, and earmarks. In practice, though, they just cannot resist the urge to spend taxpayer money on new stadiums, shopping malls, and other civic boondoggles that will supposedly jump-start economic activity and lead to massive job creation.
