Why do lawmakers insist on resurrecting defeated ideas with only minor tweaks, instead of thoughtful alterations that might actually get their bills passed?

A 20-cent tax on plastic grocery bags was debated last legislative session. It died. Sen. John Nutting, D-Leeds, has reintroduced the “bag tax” this session, but expanded it for all retailers and dropped it to 10 cents. But it’s the same tax, with the same means, for the same ends.

The ends are good. Getting plastic bags out of the waste stream and into re-use or recycling is smart policy. The fewer tossed in landfills and incinerators, the better.

The means are suspect. A bag tax is a tough policy. Retailers don’t want it; consumers don’t want it. Maine just went through a contentious referendum that broadcast, in high-definition, how much its people are “fed up with taxes.”

Yet here Augusta goes again, charging up the same hill it just tumbled down. If lawmakers and the public agree on the ends, there’s no sense fighting over the means, especially when right here in Maine there are smart models to follow toward success. We don’t need a bag tax. We need a bag deposit.

Say a nickel per bag, applied at checkout just like the nickels on cans and bottles. Maine has one of the broadest deposit laws, covering plastics, aluminum and glass containers, that works to remove such vessels from permanent residence in our landfills and landscape.

A deposit should promote re-use, because it would give bags a value. It would promote recycling, through redemption. It would be an incentive, not the politically unappetizing mandate of a “tax” that is more like punishment, rather than helpful prodding.

And think of charity! Who wouldn’t stuff a handful of bags into a collection box for their local Cub Scout troop or church group if each meant a nickel for them? It’s done with bottles and cans all the time. Bags would be a logical philanthropic addition.

Much has been made about Ireland’s 33-cent-per-bag tax that reduced their use on the Old Sod by as much as 90 percent. Part of the impetus for that tax was that Ireland, at the time of the tax’s passage in 2002, lacked the infrastructure to recycle the bags. That’s not the case here.

Plastic bags are returned for recycling at stores, communities have recycling programs for them and certain waste management companies can collect them. So, the means for recycling exist. All that’s needed now is a serious incentive for consumers to do so.

A tax seems the wrong way. A deposit, on the other hand, would make better sense.