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Oregon Put a Fee on Your Groceries. You Can't See What You're Paying. | Taxation Tuesday
Description
Oregon put a packaging fee on thousands of companies. There's just one problem: when you buy the product, you can't see what you're paying.
And Oregon already knows how to do this differently.
Buy a mattress and the recycling fee appears on your receipt. Buy paint and the fee is disclosed. Return a bottle and there's a dime attached to it — a dime that helped Oregon's bottle bill automatically correct itself when return rates fell.
Then you get to groceries.
Dozens of packaging rates. Thousands of participating producers. A nonprofit administering the system. Hundreds of millions of dollars eventually moving through the program.
And no comparable number on your receipt.
On this Taxation Tuesday Special, Chad Law follows the money through Extended Producer Responsibility and asks a much larger question: what happens when government stops calling a cost a tax, routes it through private institutions, and makes the final price nearly impossible for the public to see?
The trail runs from Oregon to Colorado, Maine, California, overseas sellers, major corporations, nonprofits, and ultimately your grocery cart.
And it ends with a simple Common Sense framework: THE DIME TEST.
Where's the number?
Whose receipt is it on?
What happens if it doesn't work?
Because the issue isn't whether recycling costs money.
Of course it does.
The issue is whether the people paying for government policy are allowed to know what it costs.
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COMMON SENSE WITH CHAD LAW
Understand more. Laugh more. Fear less.
CHAPTERS
00:00 The Fee You Can't See
01:51 What Extended Producer Responsibility Actually Does
04:28 Why Price Something Instead of Ban It?
07:27 The Nonprofits Collecting Mandatory Fees
09:40 Oregon's Visible Fees — And the Invisible One
12:42 When a Fee Isn't a Tax
15:10 How Hidden Costs Escape Political Accountability
16:40 How One Organization Became the Packaging Gatekeeper
20:53 The Enforcement Hole Nobody Fixed
25:36 Who Actually Pays the Packaging Fee?
29:59 When the Free Market Already Solved the Problem
34:14 The Dime Test: Can You Find the Cost?