
Washington voters approve legalized marijuana - llambda
http://mynorthwest.com/11/2121970/Washington-voters-approved-legalized-marijuana
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ComputerGuru
I'm not someone who would take advantage of the legalization of marijuana, but
I am in favor of legalization because I don't think it's the government's job
to tell you what you can or can't do. If drinking is legal, smoking weed
should be too.

I understand the concept behind a tax on marijuana, but I don't understand a
25% tax on every stage of the process... If you're saying that it's legal to
use marijuana responsibly and you're limiting how much you can buy, I don't
see the point of a whole 25% tax on top of that.

Is marijuana bad and the government needs to bribed to let it? Are we selling
out purely for the economic benefits? Or is neutral and the government are
running what boils down to a protection racket?

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Tuna-Fish
> I don't see the point of a whole 25% tax on top of that.

I would like to point out that a 25% tax on legally produced marijuana is
_very low_. A 500% tax would still be low. Considering the amounts consumed,
growing marijuana is really easy and cheap. Without the legislation against
it, when grown in volume by professionals it should have a cost per kg nearing
that of hydroponic cabbage, or some 1000 times less than it's present street
price.

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smsm42
That doesn't mean the tax is low. Cabbage is grown like cabbage, and it
doesn't have 25% tax on it.

And what is 500% tax? You pay 4x your revenue for the right to grow marijuana?
It's not a tax then, it's prohibitive fine.

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trhtrsh
500% tax is isn't 4x revenue. Either the consumer pays the tax, so its 4x the
product cost, or the vendor pays it, and prices the tax into the sale price,
so the tax us 83% of revenue.

Take an example: water costs 2cents/gallon. a 500% tax would make water
10cents a gallon. That would be enough to promote agressive conservation, but
not prohibitively expensive.

Soda costs <$1/quart at grocery, less at wholesale. But if you buy it at a
restaurant, you pay >$1/pint, for 500% markup. Yet it's not prohibitve,
because the baseline is sooooo cheap.

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Retric
Municipal water costs in the US average around .0015 cents a gallon. Flushing
your toilets with .0075 cents per gallon would not be prohibitive, growing
crops with .0075 cents per gallon water would be. However, far more water goes
to growing crops than flushing toilets.

PS: There are actually huge swings in water costs in different areas, which
does impact water use significantly.

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sliverstorm
_growing crops with .0075 cents per gallon water would be_

Only because everybody else is growing with 0.0015 cents a gallon. If
everybody was growing with 0.0075 cents per gallon, food would be more
expensive, but we wouldn't suddenly be unable to feed ourselves.

~~~
Retric
All things being equal if water averaged .0075 cents per gallon it's because
there was less of it. So, we would still use some of it to grow crops, but we
would not be growing as much food.

PS: We are used to abundance, but there really are hard limits out there.

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blackhole
Provided we also legalize same-sex marriage, this voting cycle will make me
proud to be a Washington native.

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askimto
Y'all also fell for another initiative from Tim Eyman.

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genwin
Why is a roadblock to higher taxes bad? As long as the current tax % is
sufficient, I don't see why that % shouldn't be sustained indefinitely.

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xxpor
The exact same thing keeps being struck down by the state Supreme Court nearly
every year.

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Tiktaalik
It'll be interesting to see what, if any, effect this has north of the border
in British Columbia. Marijuana decriminalization and legalization has often
been discussed in Canada, but one of the main arguments against a change in
the law is that the United States would not approve. Seems like that may be
changing.

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flyinRyan
>but one of the main arguments against a change in the law is that the United
States would not approve.

How embarrassing for your country. The US doesn't approve of prostitution
either, though?

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jlgreco
To my knowledge there is no equivalent of the Controlled Substances Act.
Prostitution laws are all state laws.

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davidw
It'd be nice if we could leave politics to other sites, please. Pretty please?
There are a zillion sub-reddits where you can discuss this stuff as much as
you want, but just one Hacker News, which does not need to go political.

(I'm pretty happy with the results too, but that's neither here nor there)

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jayfuerstenberg
Congratulations Washington! Today is a day of forward thinking across the
United States.

Also, Colorado voted to legalize Marijuana as well.

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numbsafari
This'll take a lot of pressure off of people in Redmond...

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timfrietas
How so? You can still fail a drug test for weed, same as you can for alcohol,
and employers like MS can still fire you.

~~~
curiousDog
MS doesn't do drug tests. Atleast I don't remember taking one when I was
there.

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exolxe
It's interesting to consider how much of the legislative and voting process
actually impacts the act.

A lot of voters probably view marijuana as positive/neutral, though how many
were actually swayed by the 25% tax?

In the end there's a larger systemic problem, where you compromise and are
either hurting consumers of a neutral/positive product or benefiting as a
governmental system by feeding off of a negative product. Either way,
regardless of your views it's a forward step for society, though with somewhat
perverse implications.

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veidr
Ah, the smell of progress...

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adamnemecek
I just moved here but this seems like a big deal too
[http://vote.wa.gov/results/current/Initiative-Measure-
No-124...](http://vote.wa.gov/results/current/Initiative-Measure-
No-1240-Concerns-creation-of-a-public-charter-school-system_ByCounty.html)

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Metrop0218
Moving up next year, makes me happy to see.

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hayksaakian
We also got another district this cycle. Hurrah. Northwest peoples!

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colmvp
California... _shake my head_

