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Danny Westneat Westneat: Bellingham bags it, but not the Seattle way

The first thing Jill McIntyre Witt and Brooks Anderson will tell you is they are hardly professional lawmakers. Which might have something to do with why the new law they wrote makes so much sense.

On Monday, Bellingham banned plastic bags, becoming the area's second city to do so, after Edmonds. It did it with almost none of the fighting and bitterness that attended Seattle's own failed efforts to go bagless back in 2009.

Bellingham's law passed its City Council unanimously. Very few people squawked about big or overreaching government. Even the grocery stores got on board, urging the council to go ahead and ban the bags at their own stores.

Why so different from what happened here? Turns out that was by design.

"Obviously we didn't want to repeat anything that Seattle had tried," said McIntyre Witt, a mom of two and physical-education teacher who co-wrote the ordinance.

Seconded Anderson, co-founder of the grass-roots group Bag It Bellingham: "We looked at what happened in Seattle and thought — ours has got to work with people. It can't be seen as cramming it down their throats."

The two women got to talking in January and discovered they shared a disbelief that Bellingham hadn't done anything about plastic bags. They decided to see if they could ban them.

Researching what other places had done, the two say Seattle was on to something when it tried to discourage use of both plastic and paper bags. Other cities have banned just plastic and then seen the use of paper soar.

But the flaw they saw in Seattle won't come as a shocker: too much government. The law here would have put fees of 20 cents on both types of bags. But then it would have funneled $3 million to $10 million a year back into City Hall, to be used for staff to oversee and police the bag-fee program, as well as to educate us about our waste streams and who knows what else.

"To have such a huge part of it go to administration, I can understand why the people in Seattle said no," Anderson said.

The Bellingham ordinance, by contrast, doesn't hoover up a dime for the city. It bans plastic bags outright. Then it places a nickel-per-bag fee on paper bags, to nudge shoppers toward reusable cloth bags instead. But all the money stays with the retailers, to defray costs for dropping the cheaper plastic bags.

Unlike in Seattle, there will be no tax collections, no auditing, no additional bureaucracy.

"As much as possible, we didn't want this to be a project of the government," McIntyre Witt said. "We definitely didn't want it to be a moneymaker for the city. Because then people would just spin it as another tax.

Obama Just Isn't Liberal, Enough « Blogs For Victory

…Of course, invoking the Fourteenth Amendment has always been a long shot, a last refuge. But Obama’s seeming refusal to hold it in reserve (“like the fire axe on the wall,” in Garrett Epps’s words) is emblematic of his all too civilized, all too accommodating negotiating strategy—indeed, of his whole approach to the nation’s larger economic dilemma, the most disappointing aspect of his Presidency. His stimulus package asked for too little and got less. He has allowed deficits and debt to supersede mass unemployment as the emergency of the moment. He has too readily accepted Republican terms of debate, such as likening the country to a household that must “live within its means.” (For even the most prudent householders, living within one’s means can include going into debt, as in taking out a car loan so that one can get to one’s job.) He has done too little to educate the public to the wisdom of post-Herbert Hoover economics: fiscal balance is achieved over time, not in a single year; in flush times a government should run a surplus, but when the economy falters deficits are part of the remedy; when the immediate problem is what it is now—a lack of demand, not a shortage of capital—higher spending is generally more efficacious than lower taxes, especially lower taxes on the rich…

One does have to wonder – that was written by Hendrik Hertzberg.  He’s a well-educated man:  at least, his credentials say so.  But does he really believe that there was in what FDR did a stark contrast to what Hoover did?  Does he further believe that what FDR did worked?  Hoover spent bags of money trying to fix the economy (little remembered is how in 1932 FDR ran on a balanced budget platform).  FDR just spent bags and bags and bags.  Hoover didn’t fix the depression, neither did FDR.  Yet here we are in 2011 and here is Mr. Hertzberg, certain that the lesson of the past is that you have to go flat out in spending…don’t do what Hoover did!

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