California’s Shortfall Swells to $16 Billion

Shortfall in California’s Budget Swells to $16 Billion
http://www.infowars.com/shortfall-i
n-californias-budget-swells-to-16-b
illion/

Regulating Cannabis Sales Could Yield Over $17 Billion In Annual Savings And Revenue, New Study Says

http://blog.norml.org/2010/09/29/re
gulating-cannabis-sales-could-yield
-over-17-billion-in-annual-savings-
and-revenue-new-study-says/

Treating marijuana as a legally regulated commodity would yield some $17.4 billion dollars annually in cost savings and new tax revenue, according to an economic report published yesterday by the CATO Institute think tank in Washington, DC.

The report, entitled “The Budgetary Impact of Ending Drug Prohibition,” estimates that taxing the commercial sale of marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol would generate some $8.7 billion in annual revenue. The report further estimates that abolishing marijuana prohibition would additionally yield approximately $9 billion in annual law enforcement savings. Full text of the entire report is available for download here.

A previous 2005 study commissioned by NORML estimated that marijuana law enforcement cost taxpayers some $7.6 billion per year.

A separate California statewide analysis published in 2009 by the state Board of Equalization and Taxation estimated that imposing retail taxes on the commercial sale of cannabis in California would yield approximately $1.4 billion in yearly revenue.

An op/ed in favor of legalization by the CATO study’s co-author, Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University, appears in today’s Los Angeles Times here.

Pot Legalization Could Save U.S. $13.7 Billion Per Year, 300 Economists Say

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/
04/17/economists-marijuana-legaliza
tion_n_1431840.html

Your plans to celebrate 4/20 this Friday could actually make the government some money, if only such activities were legal. That’s according to a bunch of economists, and some prominent ones too.

More than 300 economists, including three nobel laureates, have signed a petition calling attention to the findings of a paper by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, which suggests that if the government legalized marijuana it would save $7.7 billion annually by not having to enforce the current prohibition on the drug. The report added that legalization would save an additional $6 billion per year if the government taxed marijuana at rates similar to alcohol and tobacco.

That's as much as $13.7 billion per year, but it's still minimal when compared to the federal deficit, which hit $1.5 trillion last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

While the economists don't directly call for pot legalization, the petition asks advocates on both sides to engage in an "open and honest debate" about the benefits of pot prohibition.

"At a minimum, this debate will force advocates of current policy to show that prohibition has benefits sufficient to justify the cost to taxpayers, foregone tax revenues, and numerous ancillary consequences that result from marijuana prohibition," the petition states.

The economic benefits of pushing pot into mainstream commerce have long been cited as a reason to make the drug legal, and the economists' petition comes as government officials at both the federal and local levels are looking for ways to raise funds. The majority of Americans say they prefer cutting programs to increasing taxes as a way to deal with the nation’s budget deficit -- marijuana legalization would seemingly give the government money without doing either.

Officials in one state have already made the economic argument for pot legalization, but to no avail. California Democratic State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano proposed legislation in 2009 to legalize marijuana in California, arguing that it would yield billions of dollars in tax revenue for a state in dire need of funds. California voters ultimately knocked down a referendum to legalize marijuana in 2010.

Economist Stephen Easton wrote in Businessweek that the financial benefits of pot legalization may be even bigger than Miron's findings estimate. Based on the amount of money he thinks it would take to produce and market legal marijuana, combined with an estimate of marijuana consumers, Eatson guesses that legalizing the drug could bring in $45 to $100 billion per year. Easton’s name doesn't appear on the petition.

Some argue that the economic argument for pot legalization is already proven by the benefits states and cities have reaped from making medical marijuana legal. Advocates for Colorado's medical marijuana industry argue that legalization has helped to jumpstart a stalled economy in cities like Boulder and Denver, according to nj.com.

Over 300 Economists Agree: It’s Time to Legalize Marijuana

http://blog.norml.org/2012/04/17/ov
er-300-economists-agree-its-time-to
-legalize-marijuana/

Over 300 economists have signed on to an open letter to the President, Congress, Governors, and State Legislators asking them to allow this “country to commence an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition.” The petition states that the undersigned “believe such a debate will favor a regime in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other goods.”

Notably, three of the economists who have already signed on are Nobel Laureates. Three hundred plus additional economic scholars have already signed on, you can view the list and more details here. Full text of the petition letter is below:

    We, the undersigned, call your attention to the attached report by Professor Jeffrey A. Miron, The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition. The report shows that marijuana legalization — replacing prohibition with a system of taxation and regulation — would save $7.7 billion per year in state and federal expenditures on prohibition enforcement and produce tax revenues of at least $2.4 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like most consumer goods. If, however, marijuana were taxed similarly to alcohol or tobacco, it might generate as much as $6.2 billion annually.

    The fact that marijuana prohibition has these budgetary impacts does not by itself mean prohibition is bad policy. Existing evidence, however, suggests prohibition has minimal benefits and may itself cause substantial harm.

    We therefore urge the country to commence an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition. We believe such a debate will favor a regime in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other goods. At a minimum, this debate will force advocates of current policy to show that prohibition has benefits sufficient to justify the cost to taxpayers, foregone tax revenues, and numerous ancillary consequences that result from marijuana prohibition.

You can view media coverage of this effort here.

Drug War: What Prohibition Costs Us

http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionl
a/2011/10/drug-war-blowback.html

Drug prohibitionists like former White House drug czar staffer Kevin A. Sabet seem to be in a panic over Ken Burns' PBS documentary broadcast "Prohibition" because of its clear and convincing parallel to today's equally disastrous war on drugs.

The earlier experiment lasted less than 14 years, but today’s failed prohibition was declared by President Nixon 40 years ago and has cost our country more than $1 trillion in cash and much more in immeasurable social harm.

As a student of history and a retired deputy chief of police with the Los Angeles Police Department, I can attest that the damage that came from the prohibition of alcohol pales in comparison to the harm wrought by drug prohibition. In the last 40 years drug money has fueled the growth of violent street gangs in Los Angeles, from two (Bloods and Crips) with a membership of less than 50 people before the drug war to 20,000 gangs with a membership of about 1 million across the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Justice. These gangs serve as the distributors, collection agents and enforcers for the Mexican cartels that the Justice Department says occupy more than 1,000 U.S. cities.

Sabet, a former advisor to the White House drug policy advisor, ignores these prohibition-created harms, making no mention of the nearly 50,000 people killed in Mexico over the last five years as cartels have battled it out to control drug routes, territories and enforce collections. When one cartel leader is arrested or killed, it makes no impact on the drug trade and only serves to create more violence, as lower-level traffickers fight for the newly open top spot.

U.S. law enforcement officials report that as much as 70% of cartel profits come from marijuana alone. There's no question that ending today's prohibition on drugs -- starting with marijuana -- would do more to hurt the cartels than any level of law enforcement skill or dedication ever can.

Worse than being ineffective, though, the war on drugs creates dangerous distractions for police officers who would rather focus on improving public safety. For example, the LAPD announced this week that it will take 150 police officers off the streets to accommodate the state's shuffling of prisoners to the county level. The state must do this to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court's order to cut our drug-war-induced overcrowded prison population by 30,000 -- and our state has already laid off thousands of teachers thanks in part to funding diverted to building more prisons and hiring more guards.

This follows on the heels of another reallocation of police resources in Los Angeles when the LAPD and the L.A. Sheriff's Department woke up to a three-year backlog of rape kits. Police labs have only a finite amount of resources, and drug testing often takes priority over other cases that demand attention. Detectives (and victims) waiting for lab results related to rape and other serious crimes stood in line for months while tests for custody-related possession of pot and other drugs took precedence.

There's no doubt that the violence, the growth of cartels and gangs, the overpopulation of our prisons and the squandering of our police resources would not occur if we eliminated illegal drug profits and implemented a non-criminal approach to regulating drugs. We did this once with alcohol, and there's no reason we can't do it with other drugs today.

Milton Friedman - Why Drugs Should Be Legalized
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrRYv52DpqU

Drug war hypocrisy: drug trafficking's big money benefits Big Brother and corrupt banksters
http://www.naturalnews.com/034832_d
rug_war_money_Big_Brother.html

DRUG WAR PRIVATE PRISON PROFITEERING
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cOpMT59-RI

The War On Drugs Hurts Businesses and Investors

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspi
n/2012/03/01/the-war-on-drugs-hurts
-businesses-and-investors/

“The drug war is weakening state institutions, infiltrating judicial systems and undermining rule of law,” all of which is bad for business, César Zamora, Nicaraguan businessman and vice president of the Association of American Chambers of Commerce in Latin America (AACCLA) told the Christian Science Monitor on February 16, 2012.

A criminal cancer is spreading through the global economy, taking its nutrition from the world-wide illegal drug business. In many countries, your travel agent, your lawyer, your banker or your telephone installer is as likely as an assassin or brothel manager to be working for a criminal organization. Almost everywhere, narco-dollars corrupt government officials and business agencies and fuel criminal opportunities.

The global illegal drug economy is not capable of precise measurement, but according to the latest report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the retail market in illegal opiates is $68 billion (mostly heroin) and in cocaine, $85 billion. Their last valuation of the cannabis market was $142 billion in 2005.

Excluding the significant markets in methamphetamine, Ecstasy, psychedelics and other drugs, this is a criminal retail market in the range of $300 billion annually. Most of the markup is at the retail level. This enormous market is evidence that our efforts to stop the drug supply create the incentives that have grown a global criminal infrastructure of countless drug prohibition enterprises.

In 1984, 1986 and 1988, Congress injected the U.S. anti-drug effort with legal steroids. As counsel to the House Crime Subcommittee during the “war on drugs,” I helped write many of those laws. But those laws, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in enforcement, have not protected business from the consequences of drug prohibition. This is in large part because neither Congress nor the business community have ever thought systematically about the drug business, drug enforcement and the economy.

In the early 1980s, I helped Congress investigate how drug money laundering was compromising legal casino gambling as the drug business responded to the Bank Secrecy Act. Congress heard, but did not understand, how our drug laws hurt a sector of American business. Congress pushed currency transaction reporting, for example.

The 8,000 reports filed in 1985 have grown to over 14,800,000 in FY2011. What had been a minor inconvenience is now a major responsibility that costs banks hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Despite this burden, the great untaxed profits of illegal drug sales worldwide have enabled local drug trafficking gangs to transform into global criminal organizations.

Drug prohibition enterprises corrupt bank officers and tellers, accountants, lawyers, financial advisors, real estate brokers, securities dealers, freight forwarders, shipping companies, airline employees, etc. to ship and pay for drugs, and to launder their receipts and profits. In one example, in March 2010, corruption was exposed in the Wachovia unit of Wells Fargo Bank, now the fifth largest U.S. bank by deposits. Wachovia was forced to disgorge $110 million and was fined $50 million for failing to internally police $378 billion in transactions with casas de cambio in Mexico that laundered drug profits. Businesses cannot count on the integrity of their agents or counterparts in such environments, and Wachovia’s shareholders paid an enormous price.

All over the world, drug organizations depend upon corrupting border guards, customs inspectors, police, prosecutors, judges, legislators, cabinet ministers, military officers, intelligence agents, financial regulators, and presidents and prime ministers. Businesses cannot count on the integrity of government officials in such environments.

Illegal drug organizations rely upon violence for conflict resolution, security, employee management, management succession, and influencing policy makers. Over the last two years, countless business leaders and their families have fled drug violence in Monterey, Mexico’s once-safe commercial capital, as the country has been rocked by some 50,000 killings related to control of the drug trade. Violence is pervasive, law enforcement is largely ineffective, and impunity for using violence is rampant. Not only in Mexico, but in Central America, the Caribbean, Colombia, West Africa, and parts of Asia where the prohibition-fueled drug trade is extant, business personnel are frequently in danger.

Domestically, there are additional consequences. In the 1980s, America’s crime rates were near historic highs. Congress took for granted that we needed to fight drugs with long sentences. Now crime rates are profoundly lower, but most analysts conclude long prison sentences have not been a major factor. The political dynamic of being tough on crime and drugs led to a dramatic expansion of the population with a criminal record. Those records are accessible by nearly every employer. Yet, few analysts have calculated the full impact of expanded criminal punishment that has reduced opportunities for education, job training, employment, credit, marriage, and ultimately, American productivity and consumer buying power.

Today, tens of millions of Americans — would-be consumers – because they have been convicted of a drug offense, aren’t earning what they could earn without a record. Our prison population, estimated as high as 2.3 million persons, is out of the car market. Ford and GM should calculate how many cars they could sell in the U.S. if our imprisonment rates were close to those of their European or Japanese competitors (instead of 7-to-10 times higher). How many cars could they sell if tens of millions of Americans did not have a conviction-suppressed income? A reduced average household income and credit capacity suppresses sales of goods and services for almost every American business. While most of those offenses were instances of youthful bad judgment, the consequences for the economy last for decades.

The business community needs a complete economic analysis of the impact of drug policy. In the 1980s, war on drugs policies were not on the radar of business or investors at all. Today, the intensity of global competition and the fragility of our domestic economy require management and investors to fully understand how American drug policy plays with their profits. Every investor should analyze how much the costs of drug policy shrink return on investment.

Marijuana Is Going to Be Sold One Way or Another -- Question Is, Would You Rather it Be Cartels or Regulated Businesses ?

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/15228
2/marijuana_is_going_to_be_sold_one
_way_or_another_--_question_is%2C_w
ould_you_rather_it_be_cartels_or_re
gulated_businesses?page=entire

For decades, the United States has been embroiled in a debate over whether marijuana should be legalized.

The battle has been waged on the state level, where 16 states and the District of Columbia have authorized the use of medical marijuana by qualifying patients. And it has been fought on the national level, with the federal government investing more than a billion dollars over the past decade on a media campaign designed to demonize marijuana.

These political conflicts have one thing in common. They are centered on whether it should be legal for citizens to use marijuana. Supporters of reform argue that patients – or, in some cases, all adults – should not be sent to jail or punished in any other manner for using the substance. On the other side, individuals who believe we should maintain marijuana prohibition claim that marijuana is dangerous and allowing any individual to use it legally will send the wrong message to teens, resulting in increased use.

Over the course of this year, we have seen the beginnings of a long overdue shift in the debate over marijuana policy. With discussion about the pros and cons of using the plant fading to the background, citizens and members of the media are being forced to consider a new question and one that is really quite simple to answer: Who should sell marijuana?

This evolution in conversation, which has at its foundation an acceptance that it is essentially impossible to stop or even reduce significantly marijuana use, stems in large part from the rhetoric put forth by current and former world leaders. Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, directly addressed the issue of sales in a Time magazine interview in January. “We have to take all the production chain out of the hands of criminals,” he said, “and into the hands of producers so there are farmers that produce marijuana and manufacturers that process it and distributors that distribute it, and shops that sell it.”

Fox’s successor, Felipe Calderon, was less direct in a March Washington Post interview, but alluded to the possibility of a similar end result. After decrying the widespread use of marijuana in the U.S., Calderon said that if our leaders were not going to crack down on use, they needed to have the “courage to legalize.”

While Calderon did not endorse one option over the other, his point was that absent one of these two paths, illegal marijuana sales in the U.S. would continue generating huge profits for drug cartels in Mexico, leading to more deadly weapons on the streets and increasing levels of violence. In this context, the “courage to legalize” phrase was his way of conveying that it would be preferable to have marijuana cultivated and sold by regulated business in the U.S. rather than by criminal enterprises in Mexico and the U.S.

Three months later, 19 world leaders, including former presidents of Mexico, Columbia and Brazil, former Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, and former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, released a report under the banner of the “Global Commission on Drug Policy.” The members of the commission more directly addressed the potential benefits of shifting the sales of marijuana from the criminal market to a regulated market:

“It is unhelpful to ignore those who argue for a taxed and regulated market for currently illicit drugs. This is a policy option that should be explored with the same rigor as any other. If national governments or local administrations feel that … the creation of a regulated market may reduce the power of organized crime and improve the security of their citizens, then the international community should support and facilitate such policy experiments and learn from their application.”

Fast forward to August 25, when 52 people were killed at a casino in Mexico in an attack apparently carried out by members of a drug cartel. In the immediate wake of this tragedy, which is just the latest act of horror in a drug war that has claimed as many as 40,000 lives in that country, President Calderon seemed to abandon his previously asserted notion that there are two possible paths to slowing the marijuana trade – cracking down on users or “legalizing.”

Calling the desire for marijuana and other drugs in this country “insatiable” – which certainly undercuts the argument that prosecuting users can have any effect on demand – he declared: “If [the Americans] are determined and resigned to consume drugs, then they should seek market alternatives in order to cancel the criminals' stratospheric profits, or establish clear points of access [to drugs]. But this situation can't go on.”

“Market alternatives,” he said. This is the new debate in a nutshell. Criminal market vs. regulated market. Is this a hard choice?

We all know that marijuana is an extremely popular drug. (And for good reason, since it is objectively less harmful than alcohol.) Tens of millions of Americans use it regularly and millions of marijuana possession arrests and billions of dollars worth anti-marijuana propaganda has done nothing to change that fact. It is not possible to stop use, but it is possible to steer buyers toward retail outlets that sell regulated products and pay federal, state and local taxes like any other business. Doing so is a no-brainer.

And it is not just that regulated businesses pay their taxes. If we regulate the cultivation and sale of marijuana, we will also have quality control to ensure against contaminates, labeling so that consumers know the potency of what they are buying, and stores that check ID’s so that young people cannot purchase marijuana as easily as they do today.

So why is there not widespread support for this kind of market shift? The primary reason is that the law enforcement community is more concerned about their own bottom line than in seeing a safer, more controlled distribution system. Between being paid overtime for marijuana arrests, receiving federal funding based in part on the number of these arrests made, using civil forfeiture to seize money and assets, helping to coordinate eradication efforts that do nothing to affect the street price of marijuana, and many other financial incentives, they make a great living off of marijuana prohibition. Simply put, they do not want marijuana prohibition to end – and it has nothing to do with public health or safety.

If members of the law enforcement community were really concerned about public safety, they would spend their time discouraging alcohol use, not marijuana use. They know firsthand which of the two substances is a threat to domestic and public tranquility. Their rabid anti-marijuana appearances on television are so flagrantly self-serving it is an embarrassment to their profession.

Let’s drop the charade. It is time to encourage members of the media to ask law enforcement officials how having marijuana sold by cartels and gangs rather than regulated businesses is making our communities safer. And it is time for all of us to raise the issue in our own communities. Whether you are talking to family members at dinner or an elected official at a town hall, start asking the question:

Who should sell marijuana?

$16 Billion shortfall?!?  How the hell does a state spend $16 billion dollars more than it takes it?  That's just nuts.  I see tax increases coming and another mass exodus of business and wealth from that state.

 I see tax increases coming and another mass exodus of business and wealth from that state.


Silly, POT will save them! 

Pot for President 2012!

Pot doesn't have a birth certificate but Mary Jane does!

The Flower: An Animated Look at Regulation vs. Prohibition

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMM_T_PJ0Rs

Marijuana Less Harmful To Health Than Alcohol Or Tobacco, British Think Tank Reports

http://norml.org/news/2008/10/09/ma
rijuana-less-harmful-to-health-than
-alcohol-or-tobacco-british-think-t
ank-reports

Oxford, United Kingdom: The potential health risks associated with cannabis are less than those associated with alcohol and do not justify the continued criminalization of the plant or its users, according to a report published last week by The Beckley Foundation - an independent British think-tank that analyzes drug use and drug policy.

"There is no justification for incarcerating an individual for a cannabis possession or use offense, nor for creating a criminal conviction," concludes the report, entitled "Cannabis Policy: Moving Beyond Stalemate."

Authors of the report recommend that governments consider enacting legislation to tax and regulate the sale of cannabis.

"The rationale for severe penalties for possession offenses is weak on both normative and practical grounds," authors state. "In many developed countries a majority of adults born in the past half-century have used cannabis. Control regimes that criminalize users are intrusive on privacy, socially divisive and expensive. … They clearly do harm to the many individuals who are arrested, they abridge individual autonomy and they are often applied unjustly.

"In an alternative system of regulated availability, market controls such as taxation, minimum age requirements, labeling and potency limits are available to minimize the harms associated with cannabis use."

The Beckley Foundation report will be submitted to the United Nations, which will conduct a strategic review of global drug policies next year.

For more information, please contact Allen St. Pierre NORML Executive Director, at (202) 483-5500.

The United States Imprisons More People Than Any Other Country

http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org
/uploadedFiles/8015PCTS_Prison08_FI
NAL_2-1-1_FORWEB.pdf

Published: February 28, 2008

For the first time in the nation's history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.

The report said the United States is the world's incarceration leader, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which make up the rest of the Top 10.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in 9 black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 are behind bars but that one in 100 black women are.

The report's methodology differed from that used by the Justice Department, which calculates the incarceration rate by using the total population rather than the adult population as the denominator. Using the department's methodology, about one in 130 Americans is behind bars.

Either way, said Susan Urahn, the center's managing director, "we aren't really getting the return in public safety from this level of incarceration."

Now, with fewer resources available, the report said, "prison costs are blowing a hole in state budgets." On average, states spend almost 7 percent on their budgets on corrections, trailing only healthcare, education and transportation.

In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budgeting Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 increase once adjusted for inflation. With money from bonds and the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion.

It cost an average of $23,876 dollars to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data were available. But state spending varies widely, from $45,000 a year in Rhode Island to $13,000 in Louisiana.

The cost of medical care is growing by 10 percent annually, the report said, and will accelerate as the prison population ages.

Arnie was a great governor

Pot doesn't have a birth certificate but Mary Jane does




OAK, that's the first time I have heard YOUR voice

Shortfall in California’s Budget Swells to

Thats as far as I got.  Can someone else explain the rest to me in short hand?

Im moving to Vegas by the way.  This state is fuck****ed.  Mabye Peter Gozinia will meet me at the Imperial Palace this time and take advantage of that Dutch Rutter I promised him.

Stlunatix1 is a man of his word