The Wall Street Journal has a front page story on the idiotic priorities of county sheriffs in California. They are facing enormous budget shrinkage: they are laying off deputies, closing floors of the county jail, eliminating patrols, eliminating major crimes investigators, letting convicted drunk drivers out of jail early (predicting that they will drink and drive and hurt people). But they are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of their scarce local funds to cut down marijuana plants because the Federal government will give them grants to help cover some of the costs. Do they even arrest the marijuana growers who they say are dangerous fiends from the Mexican drug trafficking organizations? No. They make arrests only 10 percent of the time.
How does it make sense for law enforcement agencies to knowingly endanger public safety in order to cut down marijuana plants?
How does it make sense for the Federal government, which is going to spend more than $1.3 trillion this year that it has to borrow, to cut down marijuana plants?
This is the scenario: The U.S. borrows dollars from the Chinese to pay cops who can't catch criminals from Mexico to cut down marijuana in California that when used as intended won't hurt people as much as alcohol and drunk drivers.
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Law Enforcement idiocy exposed by Wall Street Journal
Marijuana prosecutions are a civil rights issue
Excellent article by Alice Huffman of the California NAACP, which has endorsed Proposition 19.
Sphere: Related ContentSunday, June 13, 2010
Tax benefits of legalizing marijuana -- a history lesson?
Daniel Okrent, the author of Last Call, a new book on alcohol Prohibition, writes in the Week in Review in The New York Times, on June 13, 2010, about the 1920s arguments of business leaders to repeal Prohibition in order to tax alcohol in order to end the relatively new income tax.
Okrent's history is fascinating, but his reporting is seriously flawed. He lazily lays out a specious claim and then attacks supporters of the Tax and Regulate initiative as "indulging a fantasy of income tax relief emerging from a cloud of legalized marijuana smoke." Okrent does not identify anyone in California, or any supporter of the initiative, for making the kinds of extreme claim made on March 19, 1928 by Pierre S. DuPont about ending alcohol prohibition, "the revenue of the government would be increased sufficiently to warrant the abolition of the income tax and corporation tax." But Okrent acknowledged that in the first year of the repeal of alcohol prohibition, the federal taxation alone amounted to nine percent of total federal revenue!
He says some (anonymous) persons "even believe that a tax on marijuana, which could be legalized by California voters this November, could lead to a reduction in the state's income tax." What is so surprising about this shoddy piece is the Okrent served for three years as the Public Editor of The New York Times, charged with upholding the highest standards of journalism at The Times by flagging the failings of Times writers. One of those standards is to attribute ideas and claims. His current counterpart at The Washington Post, Ombudsman Andrew Alexander, for example, writes today in his column about this particular sin of journalism, anonymity.
It is with specious suggestion that the California Tax, Control and Regulate Initiative is attacked.
Of course the question of tax savings is raised, and it is an important issue with a wide range of estimates.
In the New York Times Freakonomics blog in May 2009, Harvard professor Jeffrey Miron suggests nationwide marijuana legalization revenues of about $7 billion if it were taxed at rates similar to those of alcohol or tobacco.
Paul Armentano, in that blog, cites Dr. Jon Gettman's estimate of $31 billion in revenues, and a California revenue agency's estimate of $1.3 billion annually.
No one who knows the size of government today is going to claim that the tax on marijuana is going to enable the abolition of the income tax. Okrent's column is the crudest journalistic sleight of hand.
Posts
