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 13 |
End the drug war and grow the economy.
By enkidu on 2010-02-08 | 2 comments |
| 2 | enkidu | 2010-02-08 | |
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I think that people are vastly over-estimating how much money could be brought in from marijuana tax revenues. California, for instance, took in just over $1 Billion in 2007 from tabacco sales. This number is large, but it is not going to immediately cure the budget woes of cash-strapped states like California (which, for instance, spends approx $3 Billion/year on pensions). I still think that it should be legalized, but not because it is going to be a budget cure-all. Reply to this |
| 1 | Travers | 2010-02-08 | |
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Time for some number-crunching. One of my old roomates loved to smoke marijuana. Never understood why, but anyways, this is based off of what she spent. 60 USD per week. From what I understand, that's about what the heavy pot smokers spend. Anyhow, the Census Bureau says we have 308.6 million people (don't forget foreign markets!) From looking at the summary statistics here: http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/factsht/druguse/ it looks like 33% of combined age groups in the US have smoked marijuana in the last month. The following math is a bit kludgy, because there is not an even distribution of people in those age groups but... 30910^6.33 * 30*52 = 159,073,200,000 If we went a bit more conservative, we're still looking at about 50 billion dollars of yearly revenue. That's just the up-front profits. There could be a great deal of cost savings by law enforcement, courts, and the prison system if they did not have marijuana offenders. Reply to this |