Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Thoughts on the Seattle Bag Tax

If Gridlock Greg (how appropo) and his city council lackeys truly wanted to do something worthwhile to save the environment, save the city money, and reduce pollution - they'd convert the city sedan & light truck fleet to electric vehicles (http://mcelectricvehicles.com/) post haste, excepting fire/emt/police/heavy service vehicles.

Certainly, if Greg is sincere, he can give up his city-funded SUV for a NEV (neighborhood electric vehicle) and help save the planet - unless it's just *everyone else* who should make sacrifices.

Folks opposed to the Plastics Theft/Ban aren't inherently "environment haters" - that's not required to oppose something that's basically an elitist, dumb, and deceitful attempt to pry money from consumers pockets and offer a kickback to stores for shutting up and going along.


Speaking for myself, I'm simply tired of City Hall nannies prating about questionable science as a red herring to moralize and tell me (and other folks) how to live their lives.

The job of a City isn't to save the world - it's to shut up and pick up the garbage, to deliver the appropriate service when 911 is called, keep the roads paved and functional, incarcerate the criminally violent, and spend as little money as possible to do the best job they can of the above tasks.

All else is icing that more and more of us simply aren't willing to pay for, or tolerate. More of us, as we age, are coming to the conclusion that we're not on some teen-aged idealist craze to save the world, we're here to live our quiet little lives with as little interference as possible.

Towards that end, this referendum, just the fact that the petitions are out there and being signed at such a rapid rate, is a second shot across the bow of a vastly arrogant mayor and a city council to cowed to vary from his strident march. (The first, of course, was the referendum shooting down the Adult Entertainment Ordinance.)

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