Calif. Plastic Bag Ban Survives After All (As Do Other Bad Bills)

After failing to get enough
votes in the Assembly
earlier in the week, California’s plastic bag ban has managed
to survive and
pass a second vote. It doesn’t appear that anybody actually
made a better case for banning bags (probably because there

really isn’t a good reason for it). Rather, it appears the
union that represents grocery workers dropped its resistance to the
bill after
some sort of deal with Safeway. Unions had resistant to the
bill because the 10 cent fee for paper bags went to the grocery
companies to do with as they choose (and presumably, not to the
union members). There’s no indication of what the deal is, but the
United Food and Commercial Workers Union now supports the bill, and
it passed the Assembly, 44-29. It still needs to pass the Senate
before heading for Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature.

In other state legislation, the California State Senate has
passed the
college “affirmative consent” law that requires colleges to
implement a policy of requiring students to seek “affirmative,
conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity” if
they want their government money. Time explains:

There is some disagreement in higher education about whether the
affirmative consent standard is the best practice. Though many
colleges have adopted it, Harvard recently rewrote its sexual
assault policy without adopting an affirmative consent standard, to
the dismay of women’s advocates. Harvard’s Title IX Officer, Mia
Karvonides, said the school rejected such a policy because there is
no “standard definition of affirmative consent,” according to the
student newspaper The Crimson. Critics of affirmative
consent policies often point to an unrealistic set of standards set
in 1991 by Antioch University in Ohio, which required verbal
consent (excluding “moans”) for “each new level” of sexual
activity—a standard that doesn’t reflect the real interactions
between human beings during sex.

The California bill stops short of Antioch’s standard.The bill’s
language clarifies the definition of consent by stating what it is
not. “Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does
silence mean consent,” it reads. “Affirmative consent must be
ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any
time. The existence of a dating relationship between the persons
involved, or the fact of past sexual relations between them, should
never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.”

Reason Contributing Editor Cathy Young examined the problems
with this kind of sexual nannyism
here.

And finally (at least for this blog post—no doubt there will be
future bad bills originating from California’s legislature), the
state is tripling the funding for the state’s film tax credit
program to $330 million a year. Is the state also cutting spending
by $330 million to make up for it? Don’t be silly. The Tax
Foundation offers a simple primer as to why film tax credits
don’t
really work as advertised:

In the last decade, state governments have enacted numerous
movie production incentives (MPIs), including tax credits for film
production. MPIs are popular with state officials and many of their
constituents but often escape routine oversight about benefits,
costs and activities. Based on fanciful estimates of economic
activity and tax revenue, states invest in movie production
projects with small returns and take unnecessary risks with
taxpayer dollars.

MPIs fail to live up to their promises to encourage economic
growth overall and to raise tax revenue. States claim MPIs create
jobs, but the jobs created are mostly temporary positions—often
transplanted from other states—with limited options for upward
mobility. Furthermore, the competition among states transfers a
large portion of potential gains to the movie industry, not to
local businesses or state coffers.

In this case, California has been losing jobs to other states,
so the tax credits are just a flat out bribe for industries to stay
here. With this new money, the state is also eliminating its
lottery system of distribution and will instead determine who gets
tax credits based on how many jobs each production will create,
which seems like it will heavily favor the major studios. The
Los Angeles Times has more information
here.