Sin taxes are suffering from a shortage of sinners

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.

You can view all of Washington's weed revenue 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

As 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?

The secretary of state also publishes this data.

You can look up the state budget here: 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

What 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.

Maybe 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.

As a Washingtonian - you guys just don't have that much money. Your income taxes are low.

Oregon weed tax revenue is mostly earmarked for addiction support spending, isn't it?

In 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.

There'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.

A recentish Radiolab story about Oregon marijuana production: 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.

> … being too stoned to hold down a job anymore.

Alrighty then. Wow.