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As long as they're increasing the sales tax ...

By 25%, why not extend it to professional and telecommunications services - and gasoline - the Outraged Liberal wonders.

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Comments

I already pay taxes and fees on my telecommunications...

I do agree though that we should raise all all consumer taxes by a certain percentage rather then just the sales tax. It seems like it would be a fair way to do it.

Also where the bottle bill for bottled water, juices, and sports drinks??? At 5 cents a pop, considering how many are most likely not brought back for the refund versus those that are, that would put a small dent in the short fall.

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Yeah, actually, the bottle deposit thing makes sense. Although maybe that's being covered by Patrick's sweets tax. Or did that die in committee too?

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Not to diverge, but we need to get rid of the bottle bill, not expand it. The bottle bill leads to trash pickers tearing up household trash bags and dumping city trash bins in their quest for bottles. if we expand the bill the problem will only get worse.

Besides, we shouldn't look at monies such as un-refunded bottle bill monies items as 'revenue'.

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To have trash and broken glass thrown everywere, even worse than now.

Can't have poor people scavenging in the cities ... oh no ... can't think outside my street either.

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Trash pickers are pretty smart, they seem to target those areas where bottles and other items like that are present. I get my trash opened once a year, sometimes two and thats it. Im assuming thats a new person checking the scene to see what my habits are, or possibly the assumption that people turn over in apartments once a year, I dont know, but after they realize all my trash is trash they leave it alone. Being the cheap person I am I take my own bottles to the bottle machines, and I tend to give other items to good will. Theres no good reason to go through my garbage.

As for not using it for revenue I dont see what the problem is. We tax all sorts of other bad behavior like smoking and eating out. There is also word of people wanting to tax junk food. So consider the bottle bill a "sinners" tax on those who do not recycle. You increase the recycling in an area by pushing the bottle bill and any extra money you make is considered the "sin" tax like that on other items.

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In Cambridge, there are a number of bottle scavengers, some of them filling shopping carts or even a truck at a time. And also some smaller-scale homeless people and the occasional crazy person.

But, at least in the parts of Cambridge that I (until recently) used to go through late at night, opening of residential trash bags is rare.

I mostly attribute this to Cambridge's recycling program, which has wide participation. Picking bottles from the household recycling bins is easy, and opening bags and going into barrels slows you down when you could be hitting more recycling bins.

If you're non-crazy, messing with bags and barrels is also risky, from injury (getting poked or cut by trash, or bit rats), fined or arrested by police who are patrolling, or having a backlash against bottle-pickers. Again, why bother, when the recycling bins are so easy?

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The Globe reports.

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