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Drug Legalization Could Reduce Government Costs and Raise Tax Revenues

In a forthcoming study for the Cato Institute, Jeffrey A. Miron, senior lecturer on economics at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Cato, and Katherine Waldock, professor of economics at New York University, estimate that legalizing drugs would save the government approximately $41.3 billion annually on expenditures related to the enforcement of prohibition. Just as important, drug legalization would translate into higher tax revenues generated by the sale of these newly-legalized products in the open commercial marketplace. Drug legalization would yield tax revenues of $46.7 billion annually, assuming legal drugs were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco, they said. (Link to Story)

Marijuana Tax?

Tax it? For me, this has to be the most irritating and stupid part of the drug legalization platform.

I'm 48 years old. I have a job, a house and a life. I am a human being with rights. The government has no legitimate authority to ban me from doing whatever I want with my body as long as I'm not hurting anyone else. I already have the right to smoke marijuana, but I am persecuted for it by authoritarian goons who seem to think that I exist for their purposes. They are wrong.

Why should I have to pay some tribute to some amoral thug in order to get their position to do something I have the right to do already? And can anyone explain to me why I would even think about showering more of my money into the pockets of clowns who have already shown, over and over and over again, that they will use my money to finance their dubious activities. The less money those gangsters have at their disposal the better off we'll all be.

What I do with my body is my own business, I'm not about to pay some evil parasite to obtain his permission to do something that is NONE of his business.

Are they willing to assure us that they won't use the money to fund something just as stupid and horrible as their drug war? all their other wars? trillion dollar gifts to criminal bankers? foreign aid? etc...

Fuck them, I will NEVER, under any circumstances, pay a tax to smoke a plant. They can kiss my ass (as soon as they pay me my ass tax)

Correction

Katherine Waldock is a doctoral candidate at New York University.

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