Friday, January 02, 2015

Wondering how much revenue legalized pot brought in last year? Well, it sure wasn't the promised $582 million.

When it comes to legalizing drugs, there's no lie proponents won't tell.

For years now... decades... we've been hearing that legalizing pot would, through revenue and a cut in the costs of enforcement, effectively solve every budget problem known to man.

That was a lie, of course, but like the Nazis or the democrats, the thought was that if you told a lie long enough and loud enough, it would somehow become the truth.

Last year, the great state of Washington's pot experiment brought in a total of 0.3% of the revenue those shilling pot promised us.

You remember, don't you? $582 million EACH YEAR!  The morons down at the Lazy C bought into the lie: after all, apparently the most dangerous place on earth is between someone at a newspaper and their bong hits.
The Columbian endorses Initiative 502 for many reasons, not the least of which is financial. I-502 offers Washingtonians the chance to radically change how we react to marijuana, from wasting $211 million over the past decade enforcing marijuana laws, to creating a revenue stream of more than $500 million annually via a 25 percent excise tax (plus other taxes) on legal marijuana sales.
Well, in case you're wondering, here's how THAT worked out:
582 million in new revenue
The lie concerning pot revenue used by the
I-504 campaign and bought by the democratian, 
directly from the pro-pot campaign website.
In Washington, where supply problems and slow licensing hampered the industry after sales began in July, the state collected about $15 million in taxes this year.
That's $15 million.  One-Five.

Quite a bit less than the over 1/2 billion promised as a part of the campaign, isn't it?

With roughly 7 million Washingtonians, it was obvious this number was a lie from the beginning: that amount of revenue would require pot use at the equivalent amount of over $80 for each man, woman and child living in this state: an impossible figure.

I get that there were problems with distribution.  But the taxes on recreational pot make the price of retail sales at least twice that much as those of the black market, and with Oregon legalizing pot with very few to no taxes, that means that most pot users in border counties are going to just go over to Oregon to buy, if they stop buying from those they've been get supplied with for years.

Putting the still very active question of federal recognition of pot legalization aside, the fact is that this whole thing was a scam.  Start to finish, those supporting this idiocy have been Grubered.


Now, the question is this: what does the Legislature intend to do about it?  The pot industry wants the Legislature to let them completely off the hook.  Pot heads don't care that the scum behind this bill lied there asses off to get it passed.  Like any other group of morons, that people lie to get what they want is perfectly OK with them as long as they get theirs in the end.

I want to see the legislature act.  I want to see them hold those who propagated this fantasy accountable for their lies.

But I'm not going to hold my breath, since lying is just the price of doing business these days.

We demand that government be truthful about everything.  And then we do nothing when they lie.  And those in government who propagated the revenue lie along with the campaign that shilled it need to be forced to provide the promised money or face recriminalization as a result.

Because if they're not held accountable, what do we do the next time these scum lie?

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