If pot was legal - wouldn’t it help lower taxes?
Less Inmates in Jail because of getting high
Less law enforcement just cracking down on people who sell pot/etc.
Police can now do something more useful like…ticketing peopel who speed( =] ) instead of cracking down teenagers getting high
Well…tax rates aren’t indexed to the number of people in prison, so there would be no direct reduction of taxes as a result of legalization. But the fewer people there are in the criminal justice system, the lower the amount of resources that would need to be devoted to it, which would free up those resources for other purposes, one of which might be tax reduction. Additionally, were pot legal it would undoubtedly be taxed, meaning that other taxes might be reduced as well. Were this to actually happen tomorrow, given that every state in the union and the federal government are dealing with massive budget defecits, taxes in the short term probably wouldn’t go down.
GQ is for questions with factual answers.
This is more of a debate, so I’ll move it to GD.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
If pot were suddenly made legal, would that mean that everyone who was in jail for a marijuana offense would be freed? If this happened, how many prison jobs would be lost? And how many of these people would go on welfare and/or unemployment?
It is a factual question, and the answer is yes.
Not only would we pay less in taxes to maintain tons and tons of non-violent offenders, but those people would also be able to continue working productively to at least some extent: meaning a larger tax base, and hence less pressure on everyone else. It’s obviously better for an economy to have more currently living people working and less simply having to be supported by the rest.
Of course, the government could just as easily raise new taxes and spend them on something else, but they could do that ANYTIME for no reason at all, so that’s irrelevant.
Unless potheads were given amnesty by the President or something, I don’t see that happening. More likely the states would decriminalize or legalize one at a time, meaning that eventually everyone in jail for it would get out and just not be ‘replaced’ by other inmates. So I don’t think it would be catastrophic for the prison system. There might even be some benefits, as resources could be used more efficiently if jails weren’t overcrowded and more of them didn’t need to be built.
Although I guess revenue can be made by taxing legal pot but I doubt there would be a decrease in prison population. Check your state but I doubt there are many people in jail for smoking pot. I know in New Jersey you get a summons and are released. You probably will get a fine and thats all unless you have many previous offenses and then you might get a couple of days although I have never seen it. Dealers are something else but thats not what has been mentioned so far.
To me it seems that Less People in Jail = Less Taxes
I’m just a college grad though, so I’ll let the idiots do the math…
In the real world, probably not. The prison system exists and it would probably be used. If you decriminalized marijuana and other drugs, there would obviously be a lot of people not going to prison that would have otherwise. But with the prison space available, there would be public pressure to give out longer sentences for other crimes that still existed. The public would want to see DWI’s or sex offenders or white collar criminals or habitual felons or whatever else doing hard time.
FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHT TO SMOKE WEED
(02/19/2004)
The Drug War Film Festival is going down on March 12th at the 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle.
This festival was organized by 911 with help from the BC Compassion Club Society, a non-profit healthcare provider distributing cannabis and other holistic medicines.
The program will include:
Crimes of Compassion
Jennifer Pickford’s documentary about the BC and Vancouver Island Compassion Club Societies is an inside look at the trials and tribulations of medical marijuana usage in a sometimes hostile legal environment.
Final Days
When the LA Compassion club was raided and closed by a veritable army of state and federal authorities the camera was rolling the whole time. See this very dramatic and traumatic episode and learn how the damage is done.
911 and the BC Compassion Club Society present:
DRUG WAR FILM FESTIVAL
Friday, March 12 8pm
$6 / $4 (911 members)
There’s been some incredible progress up in Canada lately. It’s almost like our friends in the Great White North are practicing sociopolitical jujitsu - snowy ying to our repressive yang. Canada’s drug policy has evolved to focus on harm reduction instead of incarceration. Moreover, marijuana use is practically legal (it’s tolerated) up there. But look beyond the cheech and chong jokes please, a sane approach to pot means fewer prisoners, medicine for the ill… and, well, much better pot. Tonight’s festival was organized with help from the BC Compassion Club Society, a non-profit healthcare provider distributing cannabis and other holistic medicines.
Crimes of Compassion
Jennifer Pickford’s documentary about the BC and Vancouver Island Compassion Club Societies is an inside look at the trials and tribulations of medical marijuana usage in a sometimes hostile legal environment.
Final Days
When the LA Compassion club was raided and closed by a veritable army of state and federal authorities the camera was rolling the whole time. See this very dramatic and traumatic episode and learn how the damage is done.
I’d like to propose that taxes would go up to pay for all the people on wellfare because they’re too lazy to get up off their asses and go look for a job after they’ve been smoking weed all day.
I will tell you this though; if they do make weed legal I’m buying stock in the Frito-Lay company as well as Hostess cupcakes and Mc Donalds…
Note that prison is far more expensive than welfare and that unemployment of less than 5% is usually considered “too low”.
As has been mentioned, welfare is cheaper than prison. However, just how many people are in prison purely on pot possession? What air-tight, titantium-clad guarantee do we have that we will not just fill those “empty” prison slots with people who would otherwise have been given “alternative sentencing” due to overcrowding?
The real money shift would not be in less taxes spent. It would be in more taxes collected. Intoxicant taxes (alcohol, tobacco) are a major source of revenue for state and federal government. Were pot legal and taxed like tobacco and alcohol…
LOOK AT POST 7.
Prisons are not full of pot smokers. At least thats not why they are there. Dealers are in prison, pot users are fined. Please come up with some facts to refute this, I may not be aware of laws elsewhere in the country but this is the way it is in the Northeast.
Why don’t you come up with some facts and cites to prove it before asking for facts to refute it. I believe in most states of the Northeast, pot possession can be punishable by jail time.
I’ll even give you some help to start by linking you to somewhere that has a link to every state’s drug laws:
http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/law/law_states.shtml
Hey, good stereotype but you forgot to call them dirty unkempt hippies, too. Because, you know, nobody that smokes pot or does any other (illegal) drugs could possibly hold a steady, productive job or eat healthy food.
Yes, because having more consumers in society is bad (the ex-prisoners), and so is saving money for the local and federal government (<–sarcasm). Either that, or the money saved by the government would be spent on other things and thus provide jobs and/or help to people, or taxes would be lowered, also releasing more money into the economy. Though I’m not a believer, the latter has to be noted because a lot of conservatives that advocate more law enforcement also believe that lowering taxes results in a better economy.
Maximum penalties and actual time served are two different things. It’s up to those who think there are a lot of people doing time for pot posession to show how many.
People really aren’t aware of the prison problem Prohibition-type, draconian drug laws have imposed? Well…
Let Google do the walking… (let me preface this by saying these cites do not in every case separate marijuana offenses from any other offenses, but where it was possible, I specified in my searches non-violent drug offenders)
Now, admittedly, this first cite looks um…suspect (crackpot, even) but the links they seem to have pulled their data from are legit (I followed links listed under the first table, mostly .gov sites):
http://members.fortunecity.com/multi19/federal.htm#perc
Another link from Colorado, talking about a 1991 proposed change in marijuana laws from a $100 dollar fine to a potential six-month jail term, said:
A search done at the Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice brought up this link, and tells us that Drug offenders make up 23.7% of the prison population, and the cost of holding them behind bars will be over $9 billion this year: http://www.cjcj.org/pubs/poor/pp.html
Bolding mine.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons tells us that the percentages per offense follows like so:
It should be noted that the above table shows Federal Prison statistics, not State. (104 institutions, 174,179 inmates total as of February 2004, according to the above link)
A .pdf document from the [Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that in a 1997 survey of State inmates across the board, out of 1,075,167 total inmates, 507,800 were incarcerated for violent offenses, which is only just under half the number of drug offenders, 222,100. (This is a much higher number than the first year shown, 1990, where the numbers are 684,544 total, 313,600 violent, 148,600 offender, respectively.
To put a more personal face on this serious issue, I bring you this tidbit from http://pro.wanadoo.fr/tansen/bioethics/society/biggestjailer.htm](http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/cpus9701.pdf[/url)
marijuana.com (I deliberately left this source till last, because it is obviously a biased source. However, this does not make the information based off of actual comiled data any less true.) has this to say on one of it’s flyers (link folled from sidebar on main page, Prohibition Undressed)
I could keep going, probably for days, but I think that’s enough to show that we’re not talking out of our asses about how much of our tax-payer dollars go to marijuana/drug offenders, not to mention how incredibly serious a problem this poses in general, both in the short and long term.