The Washington Post editorial board's recent punditry on California veers into lazy cheap shots.
California has been getting a lot of attention recently from the ideologically reinvented Washington Post editorial board. In the last month, the Post has weighed in on how Los Angeles funds its crucial building inspection operations amid reconstruction efforts after the Palisades fire and on the state’s problems enforcing its ban on plastic bags. The Post even took a brief swipe at California in an editorial supporting President Trump’s destruction of the White House East Wing.
Local policy making — the true nitty-gritty of politics — is hard, and with the state’s largest newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, lacking a functioning editorial board, California could use a few more prying eyes. But if the Post’s editorial board cares about improving government here — and not just using us as a target for lazy political cheap shots — it should get its details right.
I already went over the Palisades fire editorial in a previous newsletter. As for the more recent editorial, California’s bag law was the nation’s first such ban, and there were unintended consequences, which the then-active L.A. Times editorial board pointed out last year. Those thicker bags were supposed to be used sparingly and only for a fee, but many grocers didn’t charge for them and the tonnage of plastic-bag waste in California spiraled. To address it, lawmakers passed another ban, and those thicker bags will disappear from stores in 2026. That’s how legislating works.
What a local might see as an earnest attempt to fix an obstacle to a worthwhile policy goal, the Post editorial board saw as an example of clumsy lawmaking. Bizarrely, it suggested a more free market-friendly solution of a bag tax in lieu of extending the ban to the thicker bags, apparently unaware that California’s original ban required those thicker bags be sold for no less than 10 cents apiece. Was the failure not calling that a “tax”?
California is big and important. President Trump doesn’t want Proposition 50 to pass and despises our telegenic governor. But if his adopted hometown paper wants to start paying attention to what’s happening here and not merely use California as an ideological foil — and if the Post wants to do the latter, well, get in line — at least make an effort to know what you’re talking about.
