UPDATE: As of June 26, 2018; a comprehensive chart is at https://newrevenue.org/2018/06/06/cnr-recommends-cannabis-tax-chart/. I don’t know that it’s perfect, but it’s useful.
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There are 30 states that have legalized medical cannabis. This is an attempt to collect and present the information that is available on how they tax it. Continue reading ” How states tax medical cannabis”
Superseded by https://newrevenue.org/2018/02/26/how-states-tax-medical-cannabis/.
“Gresham’s law is a monetary principle stating that ‘bad money drives out good.’ For example, if there are two forms of commodity money in circulation, which are accepted by law as having similar face value, the more valuable commodity will disappear from circulation.” That’s from wikipedia.
The same phenomenon applies to official revenue estimates, it seems to me.
Say an industry has a friendly Member lined up to do its bidding. The ideal tactic for the industry might be to have the Member propose a number of different tax cuts, and get the official scorekeeper to produce revenue estimates for all of them. Then the industry can see which tax cut proposals get lower revenue cost estimates than they believe. Say the industry figures, based on confidential information that the scorekeeper can’t readily discover, that proposal A would benefit the industry by $3 billion, proposal B would benefit it by $6 billion, and proposal C would benefit it by $9 billion. Say the scorekeeper comes back with estimates (to make this very simple) that they all cost $6 billion. So the Member abandons A and B, and gets C enacted. The bad estimate has driven out the good. Continue reading “Gresham’s law for revenue estimates”
Revenue from marijuana?
Not so fast.
Local retail taxes will weaken.
Local producer taxes will vanish.
State taxes will fail when federal legalization stops anti-import rules. http://thehill.com/opinion/finance/372396-how-tax-competition-can-threaten-marijuana-revenue Continue reading “Marijuana tax competition — in Thehill.com”
[See UPDATE from 2 Feb 2018 at the end.]
Amanda Chicago Lewis has a thought-provoking article in Rolling Stone that points out the federal government is making money from federally illegal marijuana. I appreciate her allowing me to take issue with her thought — “the feds might be making way more money by keeping weed illegal than they would by legalizing” — by letting me say, “’The federal government is not going to do this for zero,’ Oglesby says.” Continue reading “280E revenue won’t keep marijuana illegal”
The Center for New Revenue 