Personally, I’m with the store owners on this one. State government creates a tax on the cans, banking on people not wanting to waste their time coming into convenience stores with trash to get dimes back so that they can grab “unofficial” tax revenues. Store owners have to keep track of all that shit, handing over something to the tune of 50 million a year… for LITTER CONTROL?

Fuck the Michigan state government. Take ‘em for all they’re worth!

(Also, you gotta figure, sure, it’s 50 mil total… but if thousands of stores are pulling that scam, it’s not a lot individually. They make it sound like the owners are buying mansions off can revenue alone, when those homes probably belong to guys who own multiple stores or businesses.)

I would be angry if I knew police in my state were going around enforcing crap like this instead of solving murders and rapes.

I would be angry if I knew police in my state were going around enforcing crap like this instead of solving murders and rapes.

Amen.
This is why I have exactly zero respect for state police, period.

Do you remember the last time a state trooper busted a case open without all the work being done for them by local police, first?
Or the last time a state trooper arrested an actual criminal as the result of an actual investigation, not just because he stumbled across evidence during a traffic stop?

State police don’t exist to solve crimes and chase criminals. They exist to generate revenue for the state through citations. (Or, as in this case, protect the state’s revenue.)

State troopers aren’t cops. Cops fight crime.

In reality, they’re just state government lackeys… licensed goons protecting state coiffers… in short, tax collectors, with guns.

This is just another example of that.

Incidentally… their “proof” seems to be that there were large collections of cans on store property.
Problem here is, these cans weren’t “sold” to Michigan, at least not yet. They just have the idea that they were going to be.

So really, they’re not arresting people for any actual crime. They’re arresting them for a speculated intent to commit a “crime”.

Not to mention that the argument can be made that, sure, the state didn’t get the $50 mil slated for “cleanup"… but then, since the cans were sold to another state to recycle, and are not litter, then there was nothing to “clean up” in the first place.
So what did the state lose, exactly?
Why, the ability to fleece it’s citizenry for tax funds that would *maybe* be partially spent on what it’s earmarked for… and we all know it.

Greedy fucks.

It’s the state government’s version of bombing a factory in Iraq when they’ve been caught lying under oath about having their dick sucked.

It’s all a giant diversionary tactic and an attempt to shift some small amount of the blame. They’re hoping to get people thinking “Well these eeeeevil business owners are the ones STEALING our tax dollars and getting rich, and THAT’S why the state government is broke! It’s not incompetence after all!”

(Nevermind that those “stolen” tax dollars could have been reclaimed by the people they were “stolen” from at any time by just bringing their cans back, since it’s not like the store owners can tell them “No, sorry, already got my quota of cans.")

If the state government was serious about the revenue, instead of just hoping that a certain percentage of people are too lazy to bring cans in, they’d just plain out put a tax on cans, three or five cents or whatever. Ah, but see, people don’t like paying actual TAXES, that would make the government the bad guys. So they give their constituents the IDEA that they can get the money back… but go ahead and budget for a certain amount of them not to.

I mean, what the fuck would they be doing if 100% of people WERE bringing all their cans back? They’d still be losing the revenue… hell, they’d be losing more. And I somehow doubt that litter would disappear.

Michigan was fucking stupid, and they’re being even more stupid by wasting a lot more money they don’t have on chickenshit LITERAL nickel and dime crap instead of real crime, despite the fact that some of the most crime-ridden cities in the entire nation exist within their state.