Month: July 2015

Click to access SLS%20Marijuana%20Policy%20Practicum%20Report.pdf

Lots on discussion of agencies.  One option is have someone like Pierre duPont did for Delaware right after Prohibition — a One-Person Commissioner, not a Commission.  And for putting that office on the ballot, with an extremely short term.

On revenue, paraphrasing:

The state could collect substantial revenues from selling and taxing the privilege to sell and consume marijuana. https://www.law.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication/988796/doc/slspublic/SLS%20Marijuana%20Policy%20Practicum%20Report.pdf

In Gulliver’s Travels, we see this, as a contrast to Vice taxes:  Tax envy-producing qualities, as reported and assessed by the taxpayer himself.   For example, the “highest Tax was upon Men who are the greatest Favourites of the other Sex, and the Assessments, according to the Number and Nature of the Favours they have received; for which, they are allowed to be their own Vouchers.” Call it the “Swaggering Stud” tax.

From https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=gulliver%27s

Caps on nouns omitted in this copy.

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift

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Gulliver looks at tax policy, in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels:

I heard a very warm debate between two professors, about the most commodious and effectual ways and means of raising money, without grieving the subject.  The first affirmed, “the justest method would be, to lay a certain tax upon vices and folly; and the sum fixed upon every man to be rated, after the fairest manner, by a jury of his neighbours.”  The second was of an opinion directly contrary; “to tax those qualities of body and mind, for which men chiefly value themselves; the rate to be more or less, according to the degrees of excelling; the decision whereof should be left entirely to their own breast.”  The highest tax was upon men who are the greatest favourites of the other sex, Continue reading “Gulliver’s Taxes”