Arthur Entlich said:
NO, I think you intentionally don't want to "get it".
Oh, I get it perfectly.
The taxes and take back programs would accomplish several things:
1) remove the incentive to build garbage that falls apart or otherwise
becomes obsolete in a matter of months
What evidence do you have the printer manufacturers are creating such products?
Printers are notr obsolete just becasue a new model comes out. I see Epson dot
matrix printers still printing receipts at businesses all the time.
2) remove the incentive to produce printers that are sold at or below
cost so that people would rather toss them than buy ink or toner for them
And who are you to dictate what price a printer should be sold at? Direct
manufacturing costs (for the printer or the ink) are just a small part of the
picture. Where a manufacturer chooses to recover the investment in R&D, people
and facilities is their business, not yours.
3) the revenues from these programs, rather than going into the hands of
the printer manufacturers would pay for proper recycling and reuse of
the materials.
Now we're getting closer to the truth - it's the money you are interested in.
4) The printer manufacturers would have a choice of properly pricing the
printers and consumables as a method of avoiding the extra tax programs,
which would accomplish the same thing
And the control. You want to be able to dictate pricing policy for the
marketplace under the guise of being socially sensitive. Nothing wrong with
that, but you really should be honest about it. I would suggest that the last
political system that tried that failed miserably.
5) It would lessen CO2 levels due to less manufacturing, less waste of
materials, less plastic production, etc, which would slow climate change
- or are you one of those wingnuts who is still going around claiming
climate change is a myth created by 99.9% of the climatologist and other
scientific community?
Yes, standard tactic #273. When you can't win on facts, try personal attacks.
When businesses behave badly, they need to be guided to more appropriate
models, and if they still don't get it, punitive taxes sometimes are the
stick when the carrot doesn't work. If nothing else, these taxes
sometimes help to reflect real costs rather than the subsidies companies
afford themselves for taking no responsibility for the waste, pollution
and health risks they produce in the "cheaper" methods they sometimes use.
There's that control thing again. Good luck!
