I'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.
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sadly it looks like most of the current data went behind a pay wall
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?
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).
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
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
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.
There might be lots of weed stores for the same reason antique stores and cigarette shops proliferate - they're cheap to set up.
I disagree with the conclusions, it's not the sin that goes away it's really the opportunities to sin.
Unfortunately there's a looming issue there: "Hydrocarbons used" stops being a valid proxy for "how much you use the road" as more cars are hybrids or all-electric.
That said, those taxes did have a nice property of being imprecise enough that individual privacy was protected. I often point out to certain folks--the ones who complain that "big gubmint makes me pay for stuff I don't use"--that getting their wish means giving that same government constant and intimate knowledge of their movements and habits.
Somewhere in the middle might be a tax based on periodic odometer readings.
The general fund money can then be spent on whatever again, say the mayor's sin habit ;)
Here in Texas, I would ordinarily pay about $30/year in road taxes on gasoline driving a 30mpg vehicle 12,000/mi anually.
But I have an EV instead so instead I pay:
$500 in surcharge for the first year of registration and $200 surcharge for every year thereafter.
Oh whoops I misspoke; I actually have 3 EVs so despite being one person, I pay approximately 25x more road tax than the average driver here.
I'm not necessarily complaining about the /amount/ of tax but the simple fact that it is both disproportionately applied and far too low overall. The state should charge based on actual mileage, but since they just eliminated state inspections, good luck with that. Second best alternative is to make it a flat surcharge for all.
The only part of the problem broken is that EV owners are no longer subsidizing the damage done by walmart to a road.
Raising fuel taxes is a win-win for everyone. It makes EVs more attractive and shipping garbage more expensive. It's an effective way to directly impact CO2 emissions.
Use-taxes are just to push from the collective to the average person. Instead of having companies like Amazon fit the bill for all the road damage they produce, from their delivers to their supply chains, they push it others. Rather have those companies pay their fare share and reduce the cost of fuel for the average person.
Politics play a big role in alternative transportation set backs. I would travel more if there were bullet trains between large cities. Don't like driving nor flying nor bus. There is push against alternative transportation by both the car industry and oil industry. Political donations by these help remove the chance of high-speed rail. Even though it would improve national security and service economy.
Fuel taxes all funnel on to the poor the most and the middle-income as well. Who benefits from such infrastructure taxes? The rich. They still have to pay something, but far less than their share of wealth as generated by society as a whole.
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.
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.
How does that logic not apply to upkeep of roads and highways? (And I say this as someone who doesn't own a car and is pretty anti-car generally).
Tax bad things (but fairly and proportionately) and spend the money on good things (and again, try to spread the benefits fairly). Money is fungible, earmarks are a pointless waste of time.
But you're not, it's to make up for the revenue TX would get from you via the gas tax. Also EVs are heavier on average therefore do more damage to the road so paying for that too.
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.
https://99percentinvisible.org/club/
Roads definitely have a wide impact on communities, and who pays for them is usually critical.
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.
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.