Luxury Tax

A tax on fast food purveyors to help Oakland pay for picking up their customers' trash? In some places, like happy-go-lucky downtown Kansas City, businesses "tax" themselves through a CID (community improvement district), to pay for people to be old-time street sweepers, wheeling cans around and picking up litter, washing graffiti tags off signposts, "redirecting" the homeless and providing a general sense of calm and orderliness on an otherwise gritty atmosphere.

This Oakland measure seems a bit more outside-directed, but it might reduce how long litter looks like its staying on the streets.

Don't expect people to be inspired by the pristine concrete and thus want to keep it that way, though.

Anyone who's ever picked up after anyone - like a kid or "lazy man" or anyone else accustomed to "maid service" - knows that all you're doing is preserving your job. You pick up someone else's trash and they come to rely on it.

A high school teacher of mine, who dwelt on the "amor vincit omnia" part of Chaucer's C.T. prologue, used to say that places like McDonald's didn't need to spend money on advertising because the litter was doing it for them. That was 15 years ago.

They are still advertising, of course, and, while Styrofoam is out, there is still a ton of greasy paper coming from our food providers.

From AP article cited above: "Recent surveys show that fast-food packaging makes up about 20 percent of all litter, with packaging for chip bags, drink containers, candy wrappers and other snacks comprising another 20 percent, Wallace said. One Texas study found a connection between litter and proximity to fast-food restaurants, shopping malls and convenience stores."

No mention of those pesky celery sleeves or the landfill-burden caused by twisty-ties from the produce deparment, the stream-clogging plastic pint-sized grape-tomato crates, of course. No health-food crisis here. No, when those Doritoes go on sale for 2 for $2, somehow, I, too, am there.

I know smokers who say fast food - fat food, chips, chops, creams, etc. - should be taxed like tobacco is for contributing to heart attacks, strokes, diabetes. The line from A to B so far has been left alone, strangely enough. Health insurance companies don't ask how many Big Macs you have a week or if you sit on your ass all day long, just if you are or are not "a smoker."

So, a tax for the laziness that must be inherent in junkfood junkies who inevitably toss down their cheese paper, cardboard cups and food bags (just like filter-cigarette smokers!), sure why not?

People can be such slobs, you know.

Case in point - here's an encouraging story from one Kansas City urban neighborhood that, if anything, teaches that you should always shred your documents:

". . .we had a cleanup this past Saturday in ___."

"We" is one community development corporation staff person, a few community service sentencees, the neighborhood president, a block captian, one resident and her four-year-old granddaughter.

They picked up 77 bags of trash in a four-block area.

"I just wish more residents participated," the staff person wrote.

And the coup de grace: "After the cleanup, I was told by neighbors that people came by, opened the bags and went through them, leaving trash scattered everywhere."

My thought is that the bags were so enticingly black and shiny and organized, that the vermin wandering by in human form must have thought someone just got evicted. Great place to find that last-minute Valentine's Day gift!

Either that, or like I said, they were searching for bank card numbers and junk. . .and they like for the search to be as convenient as possible. Or they "lost" something in the vacant lots that might have gotten inadvertantly swept up. Or they're mean. Or ignorant. Or something.