11–20 of 165 posts
Ugh, is this going to look like Big Tobacco in 50 years? Vice taxes and revenue streams to be kept alive for the district? That's going to be such a kick-in-the-backside for everyone who just wanted to decriminalize it & stop putting people away for years.
I suspect that legalisation of weed is going to be a blip in history and they'll heavily tax it to phase it out. It just doesn't make sense to encourage people to breathe in smoke.
Ugh, is this going to look like Big Tobacco in 50 years? Vice taxes and revenue streams to be kept alive for the district? That's going to be such a kick-in-the-backside for everyone who just wanted to decriminalize it & stop putting people away for years.
I suspect that legalisation of weed is going to be a blip in history and they'll heavily tax it to phase it out. It just doesn't make sense to encourage people to breathe in smoke.
Basically, marijuana was legal, but you were required to purchase a tax stamp (that was never issued) in order to prove that you had paid taxes on it.
There were many reasons for this, but one factor was that, at the time, the prevailing thought was that Congress did not have the authority to ban the possession of a substance outright within the states. (Even the 18th Amendment was actually carefully worded in a way such that it didn't technically prohibit all possession and sale of alcohol, the way people oftentimes think).
This (tax law) is also the same technique that the Obama administration has used to crack down on legal medical marijuana dispensaries, while still paying lip service to his promise not to[1].
(In the latter case, the tax laws are written in such a way that medical marijuana dispensaries are unable to deduct for normal business expenses that other businesses would be).
Al Capone was also convicted of tax evasion[2], as was Reuben Sturman[3]. Tax law can be used as a "politically correct" excuse to criminalize behavior that otherwise would be politically impossible to criminalize.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/04/harborside-health-c...
Ugh, is this going to look like Big Tobacco in 50 years? Vice taxes and revenue streams to be kept alive for the district? That's going to be such a kick-in-the-backside for everyone who just wanted to decriminalize it & stop putting people away for years.
In Colorado, the first $40M in taxes each year are required to be allocated towards school funding, per the state constitution.
The not-so-subtle goal is to make it politically painful to repeal this amendment, as any attempt to criminalize marijuana again can be spun as an attempt to cut funding for education.
> That's going to be such a kick-in-the-backside for everyone who just wanted to decriminalize it & stop putting people away for years.
But it's a big win for people who wanted true legalization and wanted to address the larger problems associated with the illegal supply of marijuana, such as drug cartels.
Under Amendment 64, the Colorado state constitution requires that the first $40MM of revenue each year be allocated towards public schools[0]. To my knowledge, the rest of the tax money has not yet been earmarked, so it's currently up for grabs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that legalisation of weed is going to be a blip in history and they'll heavily tax it to phase it out. It just doesn't make sense to encourage people to breathe in smoke.
While I disagree that legalization will be "just a blip", it's interesting to note that the original law that prohibited marijuana in the US was actually a cleverly worded tax law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marihuana_Tax_Act_of_1937 Basically, marijuana was legal, but you were required to purchase a tax stamp (that was never issued) in order to prove that you had paid taxes on it. There were many reasons for this…
Ugh, is this going to look like Big Tobacco in 50 years? Vice taxes and revenue streams to be kept alive for the district? That's going to be such a kick-in-the-backside for everyone who just wanted to decriminalize it & stop putting people away for years.
Ugh, is this going to look like Big Tobacco in 50 years? Vice taxes and revenue streams to be kept alive for the district? That's going to be such a kick-in-the-backside for everyone who just wanted to decriminalize it & stop putting people away for years.
I suspect that legalisation of weed is going to be a blip in history and they'll heavily tax it to phase it out. It just doesn't make sense to encourage people to breathe in smoke.
Just because it's legal doesn't mean anyone is encouraging it. Lots of things are legal that could possibly be dangerous. Guess in your opinion someone had better get that legislation ready to protect the ignorant masses, right?
Ugh, is this going to look like Big Tobacco in 50 years? Vice taxes and revenue streams to be kept alive for the district? That's going to be such a kick-in-the-backside for everyone who just wanted to decriminalize it & stop putting people away for years.
> Vice taxes and revenue streams to be kept alive for the district? In Colorado, the first $40M in taxes each year are required to be allocated towards school funding, per the state constitution. The not-so-subtle goal is to make it politically painful to repeal this amendment, as any attempt to criminalize marijuana again can be spun as an attempt to cut funding for education. > That's going to be such a kick-in-the…
The tax revenue thing is also kind of misleading. First, that number is apparently fixed (based on your wording, I'm not familiar personally), but the there is, presumably, no upper-bound on the actual revenues, so as revenues increase, a smaller percentage goes to education.
Second, vice taxes tend to be regressive, the poor pay a higher percentage of their incomes. Some of the "education lotteries" (state lotteries that benefit education) are basically mechanisms for transferring wealth from the poor to the rich(er). Poor people buy the lottery tickets and the tax revenues go to fund college scholarships for middle and upper-middle income kids. That's not socially healthy.
Given the two points above, there's a real danger that marijuana taxation will be used to transfer the overall tax burden from higher income people to lower income people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding the health aspects of marijuana, we of course lack the wealth of knowledge that we now have on the detrimental effects of tobacco on pulmonary function and lung cancer risk. The experts with whom I have discussed this (a few pulmonologists) usually ask about marijuana smoke in the same breath as tobacco smoke, and consider it a probable carcinogen. Fun somewhat-related fact that I learned last week: a one h…
Your last statement sounded weird to me. The matching figure from here: http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/tobac... would be the volume of smoke inhaled (hookah session = 150 cigarettes). Equivalent is probably the wrong word to describe that.
OT: "Hookah is also called [...] hubble-bubble [...]"
Citation needed.