Editorial: Three terrible ideas Sacramento can’t seem to drop

State legislators introduced more than 2,600 pieces of legislation by the Feb. 17 deadline. Some of them set hugely ambitious goals, such as establishing a single-payer healthcare system; others are responses to President Trump’s actions and policies that run counter to California values; still others are simply suggestions to make existing laws work better.

At least three of this year’s proposals, however, are troublesome retreads: warning labels on sodas, a sales tax waiver for tampons and other feminine hygiene products and a repeal of the Daylight Savings Time Act of 1949. This page editorialized against all three bills when they were originally introduced in previous sessions. Fortunately, all three were stopped from becoming law either by other legislators or by the governor. None of the proposals have substantially changed since then.

This is the third time that Sen. Bill Monning (D-Carmel) is trying to mandate that soda and other sugary drinks carry labels warning about the health effects of added sugars. In past years, the proposal failed to get out of committee. That’s for good reason: To be worth the cost and effort required, warnings on products must serve a useful purpose, such as imparting new and important information to consumers. But the main purpose of Monning’s labels would be to scare consumers, not inform them about hidden hazards. And it’s misleading to focus solely on beverages with added sugars, as opposed to all sweet drinks.

When Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) announced her proposal last year to exempt tampons and other menstrual products from state sales tax, it was embraced around the nation as a gender-rights issue. It’s not.

It may be true that tampons and pads are not options for women, but California doesn’t exempt necessities from sales tax, just things essential for survival, such as food, shelter and medicine. What’s more, this one tax break would deprive the state’s budget of millions of dollars to give a tiny benefit (you would have to buy a whole lot of tampons to see a big difference in your pocketbook) to consumers, regardless of need. Creating politically popular carve-outs is a dangerous way to craft tax policy.

Then there’s the attempt by Assemblyman Kansen Chu (D-San Jose) to end the twice-a-year clock-switching madness that has no practical purpose in the 21^st century. He’s right that daylight savings is a relic of a different era and long past its expiration date, but it would only compound the madness if California alone ended a practice followed by most of the country. This state is already a political outlier, there’s no point in making it a time oddity as well.

These proposals were terrible when they were first unveiled in previous years — and remain so this year.

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