Thanks to Austin Jenkins for putting me on the air about marijuana revenue:
Pat Oglesby runs a think tank in North Carolina that focuses on marijuana taxes. He cautions those numbers are bound to change. “You’ve got so many uncertainties. You’ve got what’s going to happen with the medical market? What about bootleggers?” he said.
Audio here or http://kplu.org/post/pot-tax-revenue-estimates-likely-hazy
Transcript:
Within the next year, marijuana taxes will start arriving in Washington state coffers. But how much money can the state realistically expect to take in from legal, recreational pot sales? Washington’s revenue forecaster recently unveiled his first estimate, but the numbers may be a bit hazy.
Weather forecasters like historic models. So do revenue forecasters. But since legalizing and taxing recreational marijuana has never been done before there are no historic models. That’s made Washington’s revenue forecaster Steve Lerch, as he put it, “a bit reluctant, a bit uncomfortable to forecast.”
But Lerch recently took the plunge. He now officially forecasts Washington can expect to take in $157 million in the next two-year budget cycle.
Pat Oglesby runs a think tank in North Carolina that focuses on marijuana taxes. He cautions those numbers are bound to change.
“You’ve got so many uncertainties. You’ve got what’s going to happen with the medical market? What about bootleggers?” he said.
Even so, Oglesby thinks Washington is likely underestimating. He says look at Colorado. It’s predicting $134 million in pot taxes in just one year, and he thinks that figure may be a bit high.
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This was redone thanks to the complexity of the WA estimate, described in a recent post.
The Center for New Revenue 