Quote:
Originally Posted by toretorden
But Satch, taxing A is not necessarily like taxing B. Sure people sell moonshine still, but it's pretty hard to make beer as good as the big breweries or wine as good as the wineries .. Forget about whisky, cognac and tequilas. You can forget about rolling your own "cuban" cigars too. For marijuana, it's much more feasible for "entrepreneurs" to compete with the government than it is with alcohol/tobacco.
The point is alcohol/tobacco/marijuana is not the same. Taxing one is not going to be exactly like taxing one of the others.
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This response really only reinforces my argument.
DO you know how much a grower gets for a pound of marijuana? Somewhere in the area of $3200 dollars. Yes, that's thousands. If you compare that to the cost of production the profit margin is astronomical. It's this profit margin which allows the grower to accept the risk of what he's doing. He 's making a boatload of money!
What's the actual cost of producing a pound of marijuana? Well, lets err on the high side and factor in a gov't administrative and distribution costs and say $5. The gov't would be able to quadruple their profit ad on a tax that's 300% the cost of production (pretty substantial) and still offer a product at a price that 300X less the cost of what the private grower is currently selling the product for. There's not a black market in the world that would go through the hassle of trying to compete with that, Especially with possession being legal, all possible legal sanctions would be directed directly at him and not the user, or the distributor (dealer) who would be missing from the picture all together because the grower would have to cut out any middle man to even dream of making any money.
The government could tax there product through the roof and still not have to worry about a grower trying to compete. For a grower wouldn't be worth it when weighing the increased risk of production with the signifigant decrease in profit.