By Missy Crane | November 22, 2019

If you’re a liberal city official and your town is overrun with massive violence, rats, and poverty, what’s the first thing you do?

If you said, “ban plastic grocery bags” you’re 100% correct.

That’s what city officials in Baltimore are focusing on: rampant danger of plastic bags.

Not the fact that the number of homicides is climbing in Baltimore while it’s falling around the rest of the country.

In 2017, there were a shocking 342 homicides in Baltimore – which was the highest homicide rate in the country.

But how many plastic bags were there?

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In addition, the city just hit 300 homicides for the fifth year in a row…and we still have over one month in 2019.

And we can’t forget the poverty, rats, and utter hopelessness plaguing the city, thanks to corrupt, incompetent liberal leaders.

However, in the midst of all that mess and danger, the Baltimore City Council is taking on the truly serious issues we face today: Grocery bags.

The city council passed a citywide ban on the use of plastic grocery bags at checkout.

But it gets even more stupid… the city will also place a 5-cent charge on paper all paper bags.

Councilwoman Danielle McCray was the sole vote against the measure. Though she supported the ban on plastic bags, McCray opposed the new 5-cent tax on paper bags.

“I know that pennies add up,” she said on Baltimore’s WJZ-TV Channel 13. “I know that dollars add up, and my vote will be a consistent ‘no’ when it comes to unnecessary taxes on my constituents.”

The problem is, bag bans are not just annoying and inconvenient, they also add up to little more than virtue-signaling of being “environmentally conscious.”

There’s even evidence that they end up being worse for the environment.

A study by University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor in Australia found that banning plastic bags certainly caused customers to use fewer plastic shopping bags.

However, people began to use other kinds of plastic bags to make up for the lost supply.

Many customers actually reuse plastic bags for lining wastebaskets, among many other secondary uses. The study found that in areas that had plastic bag bans, there was a surge in the use of the thicker 4-gallon bags, which use more plastic.

The laws also create a huge uptick in the use of paper bags, which—according to some research—are actually worse for the environment than plastic bags.

The bottom line is, the bag bans have marginal or dubious value.

It’s notable that while Baltimore wages war on bags, the city has very real—and far worse—problems. [Daily Signal]

This piece originally appeared in WayneDupree.com and is used by permission.

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