5 ms·

One of the big selling points of legal weed was the ability to tax it. Now tax is bad and messing up everything so we shouldn't tax it at all? Its interesting i

• ghaff 7y ago
  To a first approximation, probably no one promoting legalization because of the tax revenue actually cared about the additional tax revenue. It was just an argument to get voters who were ambivalent about legalization and wouldn't personally be buying on board. Taxes that only hit other people are quite popular.
  • themaninthedark 7y ago
    But it was used as a selling point. "Make it legal and tax it, win win!" "Once you do that the cartels lose!" Seems like another lie, cartels can now launder product and expand reach. I say all this as someone who does not care what people inhale or ingest. But look at it from the point of view of the teetotalers and bureaucracy. It looks like a fucking mess and now we are being told that we should do the same for heroin to reduce fentenal deaths... I don't have a solution but I am not sure more of the same is gonna help at all.
    • ghaff 7y ago
      >But it was used as a selling point. Yes. That's pretty much what I said. A lot of those using it as a selling point didn't actually care that much about the benefits to the state of a new taxation stream. That said, I'm willing to believe that a lot of people assumed that people were willing to pay a lot more to go with a vetted legal source (or would only go with a vetted legal source) than has, in fact turned out to be the case. There's at least some evidence I've read that suggests legalization hasn't led to a lot of increased use. If that's the case, it's reasonable to assume a lot of users already knew how to acquire pot in the black market and don't see a lot of reason to start spending more to go legal.
      • themaninthedark 7y ago
        Sorry, I somehow misread what you were saying. That is interesting if legalization has not increased use by much, I would have thought there would be an increase. Any trend on underage use? Kids no longer think it's cool due to parents? I hope that the effort for federal legalization succeeds but I think there are people looking at this and seeing that the negatives are not being negated but instead amplified.
        • ghaff 7y ago
          There's conflicting data out there and it's a relatively short time since a lot of states legalized. Uncoolness has been suggested with medical marijuana possibly even further accentuating a shift. I guess, to the degree that usage hasn't gone up all that much, one can imagine a number of explanations. Regular users already had their sources. Sure, there are older, probably wealthier, people who don't mind a sometimes smoke or edible but also weren't willing to risk buying it illegally. But I imagine this group are mostly pretty light users.
• briandear 7y ago
  The ability to tax marijuana was never a big selling point to me. Marijuana should be legal because freedom and not because politicians hope to milk another revenue source. It should be taxed no differently than daisies, petunias, or tomato plants. A normal sales tax should be the only tax on any legal product. Essentially equality in taxation. Sales taxes should only be used to raise money to run the government — it shouldn’t be used to manipulate markets or purchases habits. That isn’t what freedom is.
• asdff 7y ago
  The tax is bad because the tax is eggregious. What else is taxed 30% in CA. Cigarettes? Gas? Things people can't avoid paying for if they tried, because if they could avoid paying cig or gas tax they would (and do). But when you open a legal market with 30% tax in competition with an existing, much more expansive market with an automatic 30% discount, of course it is going to fail.
• exabrial 7y ago
  But unsurprising. It's literally repeated over and over in history.