Tax Bucks Back Push To Boost Paper Use

This is the first of an occasional series looking at how, in sometimes odd, sometimes conflicting ways, your tax dollars work — or don’t.

In the interests of promoting a not greener world — just one that will require killing more trees to make unneeded paper products — the US’s Paper and Packaging Board, a trade association, several years ago convinced the USDA (the US Department of Agriculture) to oversee a member-paid-for program to promote more use of paper products.

The paper/packaging people’s successful lobbying efforts resulted in the establishment, in 2014, of a ‘check-off’ program — a form of tax paid by paper producers and importers — intended to “maintain and expand existing markets and develop new markets for paper and paper-based packaging,” according to the USDA. That agency’s Agricultural Marketing Service presently oversees some 22 such programs.

Let’s Conserve — No, Let’s Don’t!

In other words, while the government is on one hand increasingly encouraging conservation of natural resources, a USDA-supported ‘check-off’ program now is devoting tax dollars to overseeing a paper-industry-funded drive to convince the public that ‘paper gets things done’. The industry is employing that slogan to encourage, say, purchases of more 500-sheet paper reams on which we can print, say, recipes, or supermarket coupons, wasting both toner and electricity, in the interests of keeping a forest-killing paper mill or two in business.

‘Check-off’ programs, which the USDA has been ‘required’ by Congress to oversee and monitor, mandate that members of an agricultural products industry to contribute a small sum, based on their production, into a fund that supports an advertising/marketing campaign and all its associated costs to produce generic advertising intended to equally benefit all members of that commodity industry. Huge sums of money have been spent by industry entities across a broad spectrum of commodities to fight ‘check-off’ programs in the courts.

Issues regarding those programs have been to the Supreme Court at least twice, and opponents of the programs have consistently failed to prevail. (The arguments are, as you’d expect, complicated.)

“What we really want to do is reaffirm the desire to use paper,” Mary Anne Hansan, executive director of the Paper and Packaging Board, the organization behind the ad campaign, told The Washington Post. “We need to be out there having a voice in an increasingly competitive world.”

Added John D. Williams, chief executive officer of Domtar, a large producer of office and writing paper, “We are certainly not trying to break up the digital revolution. That would be a totally ludicrous idea. I have my iPhone and iPad. But we are trying to show people how paper can serve them in their lives.”

Or not: Some ‘bright light’ in the paper industry decided a few years ago that it would be a ‘nice’ idea to add a tad of lotion to tissue commonly used for nose-blowing and for cleaning eye glasses. Now, as a result of that totally unnecessary additive, there are undoubtedly millions of pairs of glasses impaired by repeated does of that lotion — the presence of which is nowhere announced on tissue boxes.