“Los Angeles residents are going to vote on a tax on anything sold in a medical marijuana dispensary. If the measure passes the city could be solvent within 45 minutes.” –Conan O’Brien
Though meant to be humorous, there is a lot of truth to this joke.
Like it or not, higher level arguments regarding the freedom to choose and the benefits to everyone to not arresting young people for marijuana often get pushed aside by those who want to focus on the taxes that will come with legalization. So we will go with that argument in this post.
Though we would never claim any study on how much legalized marijuana will generate in taxes can be terribly accurate, we will point out that the most cited study hypothesizes that it would create three billion dollars a year in taxes. That’s billion with a “b.
If you figure each new public school teacher costs $60,000 a year, that would allow for hiring 50,000 more teachersaround the country. And if you figure rent at $800 a month, this would be enough money to house around 312,000 homeless families. We could go on and on and we do not even like taxes.
So laugh all you like people, but this tax issue is a serious one.
What do you think?
