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Sin taxes are suffering from a shortage of sinners
- everdrive 2y agoThis is one of the main arguments I've heard against "sin taxes" -- in the ideal world, the tax revenue dries up because the behavior has been successfully disincentivized.
- dylan604 2y agoI'm always surprised at how "little" the use of the taxes for marijuana have made an impact. Either it's being grossly managed, or there's just not as much sales from mary jane as I would have expected.
- spaceguillotine 2y agoYou can view all of Washington's weed revenue https://502data.com/ https://502data.com/ $2,600,919,507 seems like a lil bit of money in tax revenue sadly it looks like most of the current data went behind a pay wall
- frompdx 2y agoThe secretary of state also publishes this data.
- aliasxneo 2y agoAs an Oregonian, I wish I could see the benefits of it locally. We have at least a half dozen weed shops in my town, vastly outnumbering any other category of business, and yet my kids literally couldn't go to school one day last week because the district "doesn't have enough money to staff the buildings." I know it's a bit of an unfair complaint, but these are the things I start wondering about when we can't even keep our schools open. Where is the money going?
- r14c 2y agoYou can look up the state budget here: https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/lfo/Pages/Publications.aspx https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/lfo/Pages/Publications.asp... Your local municipality probably has some kind of budget transparency thing that you can look at and by comparing YoY expenditures you should be able to sus out where the money is going and where its coming from. Would be cool to have some kind of queryable dataset for this process tho
- stickfigure 2y agoMaybe there isn't that much money in it? The stuff does "grow on trees" after all. There might be lots of weed stores for the same reason antique stores and cigarette shops proliferate - they're cheap to set up.
- akira2501 2y agoThere's a ton of money in it. The arbitrage is that one farmer can produce hundreds of pounds of product but cannot possibly warehouse and sell it all themselves. The resulting wholesale prices make setting up a shop that charges retail prices an incredibly reliable way to make money. There is no mechanism, as there is in food, to support farmers or to control consumer prices. There is also no government funded free marijuana program. It seems like it would have analogs, but marijuana is truly a unique market.
- Schiendelman 2y agoAs a Washingtonian - you guys just don't have that much money. Your income taxes are low.
- jojobas 2y agoOregon weed tax revenue is mostly earmarked for addiction support spending, isn't it?
- swatcoder 2y agoWhat scale of impact do you expect? It's a big enough new industry that the revenues are non-trivial, but there's a lot of industry and lot of tax revenue out there already. It's not like a bunch of stoners are going to be able to provide the budget for a university system or rail network from a modest tax on their hobby.
- bunderbunder 2y agoIn my state, supposedly about 1/4 of the retail price is sin tax. In dollars, that's about $400 million last year, or about $32 for every resident, or 0.7% of total state revenues. I think I'm OK with that? If people were consuming enough cannabis to make a really sizable impact on the budget, the bulk of the effect would probably be not so much a result of increased excise taxes so much as because of plummeting income tax revenues from everyone being too stoned to hold down a job anymore. In short, hoping for a really noticeable budgetary impact from recreational cannabis legalization is probably a "be careful what you wish for" situation.
- dgfitz 2y ago> … being too stoned to hold down a job anymore. Alrighty then. Wow.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoA recentish Radiolab story about Oregon marijuana production: https://www.npr.org/2023/11/29/1197955821/marijuana-state-federal-laws-trade https://www.npr.org/2023/11/29/1197955821/marijuana-state-fe... With the choice quote: There are just over four million people in Oregon, and so far this year, farmers have grown 8.8 million pounds of weed. Which means there's nearly a pound of dried, smokable weed for every single person in the state of Oregon. As a result, the sales price for legal marijuana in the last couple of years has plummeted.
- neonate 2y agohttps://archive.ph/2w3Ps https://archive.ph/2w3Ps
- bryan0 2y agoIsnt the point of "sin taxes" to offset externalities? If the externalities decrease then so should the tax. If governments are looking for a steady source of income then "sin taxing" seems like the wrong approach.
- lesuorac 2y agoI think a common argument is that it is to offset externalities but in reality I've never seen a sin tax that is based on the cost of the externality. The tax on cigarettes is not pegged to the expenditures on COPD and other diseases and etc. Afaik, all sin taxes go into the general coffers so they can't really be based on externalities. Plus the fuel tax doesn't even pay enough for road repair never mind any externalities (especially considering there's often no sales tax on fuel).
- loeg 2y agoNope, not the only point. Just adding some cost / friction to the "sin" is a goal.
- akira2501 2y agoIt's a signal that existing funding mechanisms are no longer capable of supporting governments demands. So governments have gotten very creative at "off label deficit spending."
- creer 2y agoAre there any governments anymore that are not grasping at the most improbable straws for revenue? (Actually, no, just typing this, there are quite a few. Just not the ones around me certainly.)
- alsetmusic 2y agoI worked at a liquor store when I was 21 and lived in a midwestern bible-belt state. We had flyers at the counter educating customers to vote against a raise of sin-taxes (alcohol, tobacco, possibly adult material, I don't recall) to offset a budget deficit (specifically upkeep of roads and highways). It's not right for my vices to pay for your infrastructure. Tax tobacco to fund cancer research. Tax alcohol to advance treatment of liver disease. Tax porn to fund, I dunno, therapy for people who can't view it in moderation. On a similar note, I do NOT have a problem with paying for schools even though I don't have kids. It raises property values and that's a benefit to me and everyone in the district. Plus, educating young people benefits society as a whole. I'm not some "don't tax me" guy because taxes are good. They just should be limited and targeted and not levied unfairly against those with bad habits for the benefit / relief of all. That said, I apologize for quitting drinking. Research into treating cirrhosis of the liver will have to take a moderate hit and that's my fault. /s but only sorta
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoFuel taxes should be raised to pay for road infrastructure. Align the incentives so that people can make good decisions about whether to drive or not. And shippers can make better decisions about whether to ship via rail, ship, or truck.
- presentation 2y agoIMO money is fungible and specifically locking in a tax to fund a specific thing seems like a good way to make the funding available for that thing volatile unless it’s so expensive that no matter what the tax pulls in it will never be enough. I doubt people would actually adjust their fuel consumption to the ideal balance between personal utility and road infrastructure funding.
- zie 2y agoIt's very easy to stop funding X from the general fund and using the specific allocated money, so the overall spend on X doesn't increase at all, it's just the money now comes from the special tax, instead of the general fund. The general fund money can then be spent on whatever again, say the mayor's sin habit ;)
- Molitor5901 2y agoSin? In this economy?! /S I disagree with the conclusions, it's not the sin that goes away it's really the opportunities to sin.
- ysofunny 2y agopity them without undrestanding the two thousand year old idea of "forgiveness from sin" pity even more them who really believe the government is funded through taxes, not through credit
- AliAbdoli 2y agoTax social media platforms' advertising money. Their current incentives of maximizing engagement is fucking everyone especially the youth.
- henearkr 2y agoReminds me of "Japan urges its young people to drink more to boost economy" (two years ago): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62585809 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62585809
- paulryanrogers 2y agoThis seems like madness. Especially as more links to cancer and other trouble are being found with alcohol. Like they're literally trading young people's health to move numbers on spreadsheets.
- henearkr 2y agoI agree totally with you.
- thrill 2y agoWe'll just broaden our definitions.
- sien 2y agoIt's surprising that the article doesn't mention Australia. In Australia a packet of cigarettes now costs $AUD 40. The Australian government is also banning vapes with tobacco. There is now a substantial industry of illegal tobacco that has recently appeared.
- rstuart4133 2y agoIt looks to me that the goal of taxing tobacco in Australia was to discourage the use of tobacco, not raise revenue. Forcing plain packaging, banning advertising, making retailers hide the product are things you do if you are using it as a form of taxation. Running out of sinners is not a problem, it's the goal. If you want an example from Australia, try gambling. Moderate taxes, state sanctioned lottery's and horse racing, rampant advertising resulting some of the highest gambling rates in the world along with it's social problems. That said, running out of sinners doesn't look to be a problem for gambling.
- techfeathers 2y agoI'm curious if habits like smoking will ever make a resurgence. Seems like the rates keep going down. I can't imagine we'll ever go back to a time where smoking in restaurants or bars is normalized again.
- WorldMaker 2y agoTobacco use is in a minor resurgence via "vapes". (The Juul brand is tobacco forward from a traditional "tobacco road" company.) Vapes got much of their popularity for being loopholes in smoking bans/smoking taxes in many municipalities. A lot of those loopholes have closed/are closing, but there is still a market for vape products, including tobacco, and other things for people that that think they can get away with "discreetly" smoking in restaurants and bars anyway despite it being illegal. On a different angle, some states with old "cigar cultures" have been bringing back recreational smoking inside designated restaurants/bars/smoking clubs. It's a bit of a licensing situation like liquor licenses where only so many are allowed in a neighborhood and neighbors can veto if they are too close to residences. So smoking can get a bit of a hipster resurgence in such places. Such places are not for me, but I welcome them as a regulated market.
- alphazard 2y agoA lot of people are falling for the narrative that taxation has a coherent structure, and all taxes have good reasons, or go towards good causes. It doesn't work that way. Taxes are just a wealth transfer item that can be used as bartering chip in the collective negotiations we call politics. One group wants something (doesn't matter what it is) but let's say cannabis legalization. Another group might have no reason to care about that, but since the status quo is illegal, might as well extract some value from the first group. Never give up something for nothing. As such, cannabis taxes are included in all of the legalization bills. This is the important part: the reasoning comes afterwards. Cannabis will make people unproductive, it will increase car accidents, the whole place will smell like pot, etc. Those are all reasons. There's data in some form to support all of them, but none of them are the real reason, which is that it's just good business to ask for something in return, and take as much as you can get away with.
- creer 2y agoIt's interesting in an ironic way that the article points out BOTH the effect of sin taxes in affecting behavior (as claimed) (and let's say alleged effect because I'm not going to take that claim at face value) AND the perenial use of sin taxes as general fund devices. A solution would be fairly straightforward in acknowledging BOTH the desire to affect behavior AND the need to fund infrastructure (education, roads) BUT we all know that can't happen the way the sausage is made currently. For example because the general fund largely does NOT fund infrastructure (but funds bureaucrats, govt retirees, debt, etc) and because it's hard to BOTH, say, incentivize electric vehicles AND recognize that their usage must now be taxed also in order to fund ... wait no, not just fund road maintenance but fund everything in general, just like the tax on gas vehicles did. Pickle, pickle but well deserved? The sausage recipe has become complicated enough that it's hard to make it palatable to anyone. And yet, as things stand, the whole pot largely does need to be funded. That is, the funding model deserves to be changed, but cannot be changed instantly.
- grimblee 2y agoHot take: stop requiring consumption to fill the state's coffers, just have people pay directly proportionally to their use and revenue. Example: you are a pedestrian anf have low income ? You pay 50€ a year in your taxes to participate to keeping the walk ways in a good state, maybe some calculation taking into public transport into account. You are a SUV owner with a nice salary ? You pay 500€ because your method of transportation damage the road a lot. Two bird in one stone, state gets money, society is consume less and so pollute less