[ezrast]

There's no reason the tax needs to directly reflect the environmental impact. We figure out an amount that is enough to change corporate behavior without bankrupting them, maybe with some kind of sliding scale to put more responsibility on larger businesses who would otherwise benefit from regulatory capture, throw in some exceptions for the aforementioned medical devices, etc. "Pricing the externalities in" is a nice political justification but in reality this kind of thing happens because we've already decided that plastics are significantly worse than the alternative and we want to incentivize change.

Regarding consumers shouldering the cost - well, yeah, regulation drives prices up; even my liberal self agrees that that's broadly true. Those same consumers will be shouldering the cost of an environment permeated by toxic microplastics, which we are increasingly being driven to believe will be a greater impact than that of more expensive consumer goods.

[asadotzler]

and when they jack up prices, we use the tax revenue to subsidize the poor so only the well off pay that assholery, we can do this for carbon in all forms.

[wolverine876]

For someone so skeptical, why buy the 'cost increases will be passed on to the consumer' BS? Clearly that's not true.

First, price increases depend on elasticity. I'm guessing that ketchup demand is pretty elastic; it's not diabetes medication or higher education.

Also, we can assume Heinz, being sophisticated, has already priced it for the highest possible marginal return; there's not necessarily room for increasing the price without reducing return (by driving down sales).

[infecto]

Yeah that will never happen in many countries.